


I Will Get Up Now And Go About The City

by snagov



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), Love Confessions, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Missing Scene, Pining, Romance, Sharing Clothes, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:42:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 30,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25147897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: This is the story of six-thousand years and a borrowed jacket. (A tale told in vignettes.)
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 55





	1. In From The Wilderness, A Creature Void of Form

**Author's Note:**

> "I will get up now and go about the city, through its streets and squares; I will search for the one my heart loves."  
> \- Song of Songs, 3:2 (NIV)
> 
> A note about the telling. This is a single story told in vignettes. You can read it in any order you like, though it is arranged here as it was written. If you would like to read in chronological order, they go as follows:
> 
> Chap. 21 - I Am Easy To Find  
> Chap. 2 - An Epilogue of Red  
> Chap. 6 - This Bit Of Water In The Lungs  
> Chap. 3 - A History of Writing (In Iron Gall and Milk Too)  
> Chap. 22 - Doubt Thou The Stars Are Fire (Doubt That The Sun Doth Move)  
> Chap. 20 - A Beginner's Guide to Waltzing  
> Chap. 10 - Silverskin  
> Chap. 17 - Away From Nineveh (Let Me Crawl Inside You)  
> Chap. 13 - The Gospel of the Serpent  
> Chap. 16 - Let Us Gather Up These Lost Things  
> Chap. 4 - Phlegethon  
> Chap. 14 - The Air That Inhabits You For A Moment  
> Chap. 12 - Come With Me From Lebanon  
> Chap. 7 - The Trouble With Apples  
> Chap. 18 - The Unicorn in Captivity  
> Chap. 9 - Tender At The Bone  
> Chap. 5 - Here Be Dragons (A Cartographer’s Notes On Unknown Places)  
> Chap. 1 - In From The Wilderness, A Creature Void Of Form  
> Chap. 15 - Roman Holiday  
> Chap. 8 - Up To The Coasts Of Light  
> Chap. 11 - The Flowers Cover Over Everything  
> Chap. 19 - Flour Water Salt Yeast  
> Chap. 23 - I Held Him And Would Not Let Him Go

_[Prompt: a single word, petrichor.]_

* * *

_2020_   
_London_

It is raining. He _hates_ rain. **  
**

Crowley paces. He collapses in chairs and second-guesses his arms. His legs too. Pulls them in and kicks them out. Bangs the cupboards and rifles through the mail. He doesn’t look at it, remembers nothing of it. Rain. An itch between the bonewing shoulder blades, out of reach. Rain. Miserable. He can smell it. That’s the worst of it, that wet-sop smell. The betraying sound of the thing, rain on dry earth. Petrichor. The smell of a new rain mixed with dry dirt. _It’s just chemicals, really._ But then, everything’s chemicals, isn’t it? Oils from plants and geosmin, a metabolic by-product from bacteria. There’s ozone too, if lightning cares to bother. There are reasons for petrichor. Doesn’t matter. He curls his lip at the reflection of himself in the window, against Noah-scaring clouds. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale and his dry-earth mouth, dry-wit temper. “You’re pacing.“ 

"I’m not." 

"You are. I’m watching you do it, my dear." 

"You’re reading, angel. You can’t see anything through that book. What’s so interesting in there anyway? Is that Milton again? Gah, you _know_ I hate Milton. Always blathering on about the glory of _Heaven_ and _nectar_ and _ambrosia_. I asked him if he’s ever _had_ ambrosia. You know they call a marshmallow salad that? Somewhere in America? It’s about as awful,” Crowley tosses his sharp chin out a bit, looking back at spindrift hair and that _annoyingly patient_ look in the other’s eyes. “You’d like it.”

Aziraphale shuts the book, one careful bookmark in the pages to note his place (he has been here many times, the page and the indulgence too). “Do you want to watch something?”

“No." 

"Well, _I_ want to watch something. Put something on, won’t you? I’ll turn the kettle on.”

Dry earth, wet soil. The smell of the mix. Don’t talk about the rain. Don’t talk about first impressions. You never get the stench of a first impression out of your nostrils, tangled in nosehair, caught in your throat. It’s lodged there like a pill, sick petrichor. He’ll choke on it. The death of him, this fingerbone smell. 

“What was that program you recommended?” Aziraphale frowns at the remote, at the blank screen. _Hell, dials would be new to you._ Crowley lopes over, falling into the sofa, pulling the remote from Aziraphale’s uncomplaining hands with longpick fingers. Finds the program, finds himself set against Aziraphale’s warm chest and that arm about him too. That tuck of a French blue robe, the smell of aftershave. Something of ambergris and a hint of Earl Grey (bergamot, of course) and _nothing nothing nothing_ of that _rot_ of fucking petrichor. Never that. Aziraphale does not smell like rain. The dry dust of skin and the wet of a hint of sweat at the temples. The tension slips from his shoulders a little, without asking him for permission first. 

We are not always patient. The worst is this, living together, unable to hide the bare wires of ourselves. We do not always have a front, sometimes the wires are stripped. Sometimes the electrical tape peels off. They have been living together for six months. Aziraphale and his socks kicked off in a pile at the end of the sofa, Aziraphale and his fretting over whether or not he should finish off the scones or the clotted cream too. (Crowley always says _yes, yes, yes, angel, whatever you like. I’ll get you more. Don’t worry about it._ ) Crowley and his half-empty glassware, his pile of jackets on the front table. He could hang them up. (He rarely does. Here, in this shared space of Aziraphale’s flat, he likes to prove he exists. He likes to leave a teacup with his fingerprints on it. He likes to leave his jackets, to toss his mail. To insist, just by taking up space, that he belongs here too.) 

It is never in question. Not really. 

But that’s the thing about petrichor. You don’t forget the smell of rain on dry earth, you do not forget the first time. Don’t tell me about Eden. Don’t tell me about a garden wall and two pairs of feet, each walking in different directions. An angel to the East, in white and without a lick of fire. And a smell-sick serpent headed off somewhere West, pulling smoke-dark robes about him and his hair red (as red as cave paintings will be later later later). Yes, this serpent with the stench-sick of petrichor still stuck in his brand new nose, looking back always over his shoulder. Watching the other disappear from view.

_You left me first in the rain._ (You don’t forget a first impression; he hates the rain.)

He’s clenching his fingers parchment-white. The knuckles threatening his skin. The dare of his bones tense there, ready to pop, a needle through fabric. Crowley, a bag of needles. A hand covers his. Well-kept and wide. Five-fingered and five-knuckled too, the grey hair growing a spare forest over the back. The idle ring, the square nailbeds. A hand. It rubs over Crowley’s own stab-point fingers, smoothing the ache out. 

“I know you don’t like rain,” Aziraphale says. “I don’t know why, my love. But that’s all right. Is it the thunder?”

(It isn’t.) 

But Aziraphale goes on, “It’s my favorite, really. Did you know - ” He pauses, “I mean, I met you first in the rain. Or just before it. That first rain. It always makes me think of you. Bit silly, really, but - ”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. 

You can’t when there’s a parched mouth pressed to you, Crowley and his hands at the side of Aziraphale’s face. In the hair, yes, and at the neck, cupping at the jaw. This _I am so thirsty, god, let me drink of you._ His mouth there and the familiar tangle of well-practiced lovers, of well-read books, of knowing how, exactly, to crack into a creme brulee. _Hand me a spoon, let me shatter the glaze-top of you._ Their tangled-knot mouths and tangled-root hair, like hellscream and smokestacks, this slip of the fall back on the sofa and this slip of waistbands and hands and _oh hell is anyone watching the program anymore, does it matter, we can catch it next time._ Yes, yes, yes, lie back, open up, forget about the rain. Forget about it all. It doesn’t matter.

There’s nothing storming here.


	2. An Epilogue of Red

_[Prompt: Crowley talks about the stars.]_

* * *

_Rome  
October 312_

_Tell me about stars,_ Aziraphale had said. It had been one of those wide and drunken questions. You know the sort. The questions of _do you think trees can talk to each other_ and _should we order another round?_

“I mean, there’s no _plan_ to them, angel. We just threw them up there. See what they do. They crash into each other sometimes even.”

“Oh dear.“ 

"Yeah, they supernova out. Or form a binary star system. You never know, not really. Throw two stars together, crash, bang, whatever. See what comes out.”

Watch the mouth shape the words. The skinny-stick mouth and the trowel jaw. The hidden eyes, somewhere past dark lenses. Crowley’s hair is long this century, long and a bit wild. Red as Attic pottery, something distantly remembered. Crowley is red and black, Aziraphale knows. Red as an amphora and his sharp-edged black like the painted monsters, yes. Monsters. This serpent-headed monster. 

He doesn’t _look_ much like a monster. Aziraphale twists the ring on his finger. Picks up his glass, wondering if he’s drinking too quickly. Drinks anyway. 

_Tell me about the stars,_ Aziraphale had said. 

“And the colors?” He says. 

Crowley blinks. “The colors?”

“Well, there are the white stars. But the red ones too.”

“Oh, that. Angel, they’re all the same color.”

“Don’t _lie_ to me, Crowley. I can see them.”

Crowley, of all things, smiles. “It’s just the way things work, right? The way light bends and shifts. It’s gonna take a lot more wine to explain it all." 

"I have nowhere to be until next week.”

“Oh?” Crowley arches a brow, “Where you goin’?”

“I’m supposed to place a parhelion in the sky,” Aziraphale says, pausing slightly. “Over the Tiber.”

Crowley frowns, “Next week? What for?”

“Let’s not talk shop, Crowley. You were talking about light." 

"Right, right. Anyway, angel. So, get this. Light’s a bit weird, the way it bends about through things and how fast and anyway. My point is that you don’t get all of it, not at the same time. Well, sometimes you do. That’s when it’s white, right? Like this candle. This shit here. Yeah. Okay, but the thing is that all of it is getting bigger.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, a lot bigger. And it’s gonna keep doing it. So some light’s gotta travel a real long way and human eyes see the longest wavelengths as red. Humans will all figure this out later, don’t worry about them. But my point is, really - it’s that those red stars? Those are the longest ones, the furthest stars. That’s the oldest light up there. First ones we did.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale breathes (words don’t matter in the pulse of stars).

“Yeah,” Crowley says, lapsing to nothing. He gets like this sometimes. Talks too much, the words tumbling out, one over another over another. Then nothing, like they’ve all been poured out. Aziraphale has the strangest desire to put a hand on his shoulder. But he thinks of snakes. He knows they’re still before they attack. This one seems tamer than it should be, sunwarm and rockdrunk, but Aziraphale hesitates. He isn’t sure. _What can I do for you?_

“I’d like to see them,” Aziraphale says. Whispers, really, into the space between them.

Crowley looks at him. Turns his entire body, the full mess of him. The angles and the scribbles too. As sharp-edged as a chiseled inscription, a Latin invocation written in stone. _Why do you make me feel like I cannot breathe?_ (He doesn’t know. He ignores it. This is a monster, not a man. Remember Heaven and their careful warnings, remember the smell of brimstone sticking to the back of Crowley’s snake-form, there in Eden. Aziraphale pauses, sniffs. He hasn’t smelled brimstone in ages. Right now, there is only the smell of the sticky-floored tavern, this wood table, this too-sharp wine.) 

“We could go sometime,” Crowley says. It’s a carefully-put sentence, designed to gentle a wild thing. Soft. “If you like. It’s up to you.” He shrugs, looks away. Drinks from the cup.

“Maybe sometime,” Aziraphale nods. It’s not an agreement. It’s not a refusal. _Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. I don’t know why, don’t ask me why. I would say yes to anyone but you and I don’t know why. Tell me why it matters, tell me why you are different. Tell me why I can go hours without thinking about you and when I do, I stop everything I’m doing. Tell me why I remember you better than the rest. Why the years are too short when you’re in them and too long when you’re not. Is it a Hell thing? A Heaven thing? Did you do this? (Worse, is it me?)_

“Yeah,” Crowley laughs a little, “Yeah, sure. No problem, angel. Someday, you know, you let me know. Off in the stars. Show you whatever you like.” He drains the glass, the pale road of his throat working to polish it. His hair catching in the candlelight and the dark glasses too. “I should go. Evil things don’t do themselves.”

He leaves by the front tavern door. Aziraphale watches for a very long time, this cut of dark fabric and acutely angular arms pushing the door open into the night. This mess of red hair, red red hair. It is the last thing left in his eyes, the last image, the color of redshift and the oldest stars, flung somewhere deep out into the night by strange-fingered hands.


	3. A History of Writing (In Iron Gall and Milk Too)

_[Prompt: Ink]_

* * *

_Glastonbury, England  
1347 _

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. They have always been right.

Let’s go back. Back, back, further back. Crowley and his kicking about in deserts and dust. His hair long and tangled with sand and sun, the freckles on the tips of his too-human ears, his well-bitten lower lip. He remembers taverns and he remembers sitting around fires and he remembers temple gossip. _Have you ever been in love?_ (It’s always the talk of them, of mankind. Love. They’re sick with it, fascinated by it.) 

“No.” (Yes. He just didn’t know it yet. He knew the word, didn’t know that’s what you call the space in your heart. The carved out bit of himself, this empty space. Love infects you like bacteria does. It’s catching. It carves holes in your very sinew, your very skin. You cannot fill it up, not with anything else.) It’s sometime very early, though long after Eden, that Crowley gets tired of filling human ears with his scrabbles at explaining the empty space. So he’d taken a bit of stone and a chisel too. Tried to put it there. (Humans die, disappear. Leave no trace of what he’s told them. So he tells the stone instead.) And there, in Sumer sometime in 3400 BCE, he tells the stone about ache. It’s fitting, isn’t it, that he’s talking about carved out spaces with a chisel, carving them out here too?

Love, like an infection, like a virus. Endlessly repeating, endlessly replicating. 

Tell me the history of the world. Show me how to write it in ink and in stone. The humans pick up on Crowley’s invention. He smirks a bit, the lazy smile on a nervous mouth. He’s responsible for the stories about most angels, the kind ones at least. The ones with pale eyes and unstilled hands and who brighten at the idea of baked bread. (Crowley sees it as a proper Evil Deed at first. Stone tablets. Fuck, they’ll have to _carry_ the damned things. We can blame writing on Crowley. Tablets and figures.)

By the time Crowley catches Aziraphale in Glastonbury, we’ve long set down the stone tablets. This is a story about ink. He loves ink, the blackness of it and the slipperiness too. Black water, dark water. Here, in Glastonbury in 1347, they have a loved iron-gall ink. Crowley never tells the Benedictine monks that it is black as the robe of the Serpent, black as his wings too. No need to. He finds Aziraphale out near the river, searching for ferrous sulphate in the River Brue to make iron-gall ink. 

“Oh, Crowley!” Aziraphale says, laughing and standing up. He holds his habit up, his ankles in the river, his God-cloth dry. “Come, my dear boy, it’s been so long. How are you?”

“God, it’s wet here.”

“It’s a river.”

“And whose fault is that? Not mine.”

“Go sit over there, I brought wine.”

Crowley sits. Watches Aziraphale pluck himself from the river. It’s been one-hundred-and-thirteen years. Too long. The hair’s the same, pale as parchment. The lines of the face and the soft jaw. His fingers twitch, half-starved. Cramp like a scribe’s. (Cramped from too much use, from not enough use? He’ll never know.) 

“Why the hell are you all wet in the river?”

“Sourcing ingredients for ink, my dear.“ 

"Angel, just make someone else do it.”

“Well, that’s not very sporting,” Aziraphale says, though he smiles when he says it. There is the beat of too long. “I’ve missed you.”

Crowley quirks a brow. He hears the other bit, underneath, written between the lines in invisible ink. Written in milk and only seen when held up to a heat source. _Don’t stay away so long next time,_ the monk-angel seems to say. _You always know where to find me. Come sooner, stay longer._ But it’s always in milk and never in the black of iron-gall. So, he doesn’t say anything. He keeps quiet. A quirk of the brow, a nod. This anxious indecision. 

They drink and Crowley watches Aziraphale laugh, this creature of fussing at his habit and whining about _the quality of vellum these days_ and _how drafty these monasteries are_ and _can you believe what the archbishop has done this time?_

“Angel, then why the hell do you stay here? You could go anywhere.”

Aziraphale lifts his jaw (and the wine) primly. “They have a very nice library.”

Crowley rolls his eyes and laughs. He leaves later, taking some of the abbey’s iron-gall ink with him. _Let me write you a love poem. Let me write you a love song. I want you. Please. You have no idea. Please tell me you’ll have some idea. Please._ He’ll write it on parchment and vellum too but that’s never where we want to write. It’s not about paper. _This has never fucking been about paper or blasted stone._ He thinks of the wide spread of Aziraphale’s back, this unknown and unopened codex. Blank, maybe. ( _Are you untouched, has someone touched you? Tell me._ ) He thinks about the bleakdark feathers of himself. Of leaning back and pulling a feather from his own wing. A pinion, maybe. Dipping it into this iron-gall of Aleppo nuts and Brue green vitriol, steeped in rainwater by God-directed hands. 

He lays in bed with one hand on himself and his eyes clenched shut and god, this has been so fucking long and thank god for miracles to keep him quiet and fuck the world just let it bloody burn. But there are angels and they have beautiful skin and he will start in the northwest corner of Aziraphale’s back and write it there, quill and black ink, black black black as spiderstain and crows. Write it there, these same fucking uninspired and useless, so fucking useless words. So many goddamned fucking millennia to come up with something beautiful and creative and there’s nothing here but words that everyone’s said before ( _but I have never said to you_ ). 

_I love you._ (That’s all. That’s all there is to say.) 


	4. Phlegethon

_[Prompt: The night after the averted Apocalypse, Aziraphale turns on the stove to make tea. Crowley has a breakdown.]_

* * *

_London  
2019_

Have you ever stood in the forest after it burned? Can you still hear it, the strange quiet and the empty spaces between the ash and charcoal, between the few things buried deep and left untouched? How long is it before sound returns? Before you can touch the air and not find flecks of ash? Is there still soot on our faces? How long? 

It’s been not even a day. The forest had burned. The forest is different in Soho, so the trees had long become wingback chairs and polished floors. They had long become pages and pages and pages of books. Aziraphale and his half-shuttered bookshop made of so many once-trees, this bit of a forest sprung up in the middle of London. Crowley had known the bookshop well, had known the drape of himself on the sofa and the spinepress of books into his leaning back. He knows what it looks like as a ruin. It had burned. Fire, once again. ( _You gave your flaming sword away once, I thought you were done with fire then. You were supposed to be. Got that? No fires. That’s my lot, fire._ ) 

It’s not even been a day and somehow here they are, dropped off by a surprised bus at Crowley’s flat. Let in with too-steady keys and swallow-nervous hands and Crowley saying, “Come on then, make yourself at home.”

Of course, to Aziraphale, that means _make a cup of tea_. So there, he is, offensively and flagrantly in white and cream and beige (of all things) and moving toward the kitchen as if making a cup of tea after the Universe Did Not End was the most natural thing in the world. 

“Crowley, would you like some, I’ll make some for the both of us - My dear boy, where is your kettle?“

Crowley frowns, does that thing with his face, the mucked up bit. "Don’t have a kettle.”

“You’re in England, of course you have a kettle,” Aziraphale wears his confusion like a jacket, “How do you make tea?”

“Never got a taste for it,” Crowley shrugs. 

Aziraphale stands in the kitchen, one hand held out still to reach for a cupboard. Standing there aghast, as if of all the things he has heard this week, in this very week of wonders, _this_ is the most shocking. (To Aziraphale, it probably is.) Crowley grimaces slightly. Grimaces at the outstretched hand, at the wrinkles in the jacket that are never there. At the disarray of the linen-pale hair and the wide-eyed stare. Crowley has always been in love with the worry-lines of Aziraphale, cut into each part of him and etched there strongest at the eyes and the mouth. There, in Crowley’s own ash-dark kitchen and worrying about Crowley’s tea habits and _don’t go worrying about me, angel, don’t you dare make this worse._

“I suppose I could heat water on the stove,” Aziraphale says, stumbling over the scandal of it all. 

“Don’t think that’ll work, angel,” he says. The lick of flame up his throat, the firepit of his stomach. It’s too warm here in the room. _Don’t you dare touch that, don’t you dare turn that dial. Don’t bring fire into this, not again. Do you know I’ve still got ash in my hair, do you know that I still can’t look at red? I found all the twisted arms of the chairs and the legs too and I touched them, I thought they were yours. Burnt things all look alike until you really get into them. They fall apart the same too, once they’re ash and rubble and charcoal-shit. I didn’t know what I held in my hands, the Jeffrey Archer books or a bit of your bone. Don’t make me think of it, don’t remind me._

“What are you on about, my dear, of course it’ll work, we managed long before electricity.”

“Look, I don’t have a stove.” _Don’t you dare light a match, don’t. Stop. I cannot. You’re here, it’s safe here. Don’t bring fire into it. Please. God, please._

“What in Heaven’s name are you on about, it’s right - ”

They both look then at the place the stove used to be. Aziraphale blinks. Crowley shrugs his shovelpit shoulders, raising his brows. “See?” he says. 

“Did you just miracle your stove away? Put that back right now.”

“No.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale rubs his nose, “What is this about?”

“Look, there’s better tea downstairs, at that shop. It’s got the macarons too. I’ll get you something, okay? Just sit for like - ten minutes. Okay, angel? Just ten. Don’t touch anything.” Crowley looks about the kitchen, as if peering for a rogue stove hiding behind a door or a chair. _Don’t go looking for fire._

There is a pause. A stretch of nothing. They’re so bloody used to these stretches of quiet, of things to say and things to not say and how to carefully balance them on your tongue so they mean both everything and nothing at all. _Don’t go unscrewing the cap._ Yes, this, this little bit. I’ll get you something, anything you like. Crowley is very careful not to move. If he moves, he will touch. That’s the problem. The problem is that he has five senses and he can see Aziraphale and smell Aziraphale, hear him too. But he cannot convince his fingers or his tongue that Aziraphale is alive. They twitch. In the pockets, the tongue in the mouth. _Please, let me. I need you. Let me make certain. You’re here, you’re whole. You’re alive. Let me convince myself. I need you._

He doesn’t open his mouth. He doesn’t move.

“Perhaps, not tea then,” Aziraphale says very quietly. Crowley watches him, the turn of the body and the swallow of the throat. The long blink of bluejay eyes and this too too too hot kitchen smelling like burn. (He is so sick of fire.) “Do you have a red?” (There is something in the voice, this quiet tone. The move of the brows and the soft stare, the way Aziraphale fumbles at his lower lip. Crowley looks away, warm in the ears.)

“Yeah, ‘course, angel. That rack over there." 

Tell me about a forest fire. Wildfire and hellfire too. Tell me how long it takes before the leaves come back and the undergrowth is thick. Tell me how long it takes before it stops smelling like smoke and our lungs are safe once more. But let’s remember the secret of wildfires too, that forests cannot live without a fire, that all things must be bare sometimes.

They drink. Aziraphale reaches out with question-mark hands, reaching up like the first shoot of growth. Brushes a bit of ash from emberscorch hair.


	5. Here Be Dragons (A Cartographer’s Notes on Unknown Places)

_[Prompt: Maps]_

* * *

_2019  
London_

How did we get here? There’s no map. Tell me. 

There is an island in the middle of an empty room. It is built out of sleek steel-frame and black bolts. It is piled with soft sheets. Egyptian cotton, 500-count thread. It is pillowed and soft, pulled into the center of the room and dominating the space. There is no dresser, no lamp, no little table. Nothing to suggest that there is anything to do here but sleep. This island of a bed in the center of Crowley’s greypaint room.

“Are you sure?” Crowley asks. Aziraphale knows it’s not the first time he’s asked, that it won’t be the last. Crowley’s been standing there with his bags packed for centuries, waiting for Aziraphale to say _yes yes yes let’s go off together._ But he doesn’t know the way either, only that he’s put gas in the car and has washed the sheets. Neither of them know the way. This is why there are maps.

_Let me make a map of you._

“My love, I would burn the bookshop again if I need to, I am that certain. Get in bed, dear.“ 

There is a temptation to assume that one of us knows the way. That when we fall into bed together, one of us will take the other in hand and say _this is how it’s done, don’t worry, I know what I’m doing, let me show you._ We don’t want to think about stumbling blindly into the blank spots of the map, into this _here be dragons_ of us together. But the first time is always a surprise, no matter what your history is, no matter who has touched you before. Aziraphale’s pulse a steady drumbeat. Pick it out, this percussion. The thing is, he’s terrified. His hands are terrified and his mouth too. The sweat of him. Crowley and his shaking hands, Aziraphale and his shivering arms. _Show me what you like, what makes you feel good. Please, my dear._

“I want you, I have always wanted you even before -”

“Before what?” Crowley asks, eyes wide and unsteady, his spider grip tight in Aziraphale’s shoulders. These soil-digging fingers, trying to grab handfuls of Aziraphale. 

_Before I knew what I wanted. Before I could say it. You held out an apple once and I didn’t know what that meant, I didn’t even know I was hungry. (Did you know what it was, I’m not sure you did either.)_ Aziraphale doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. There are no lines drawn here, there are no rules, there are no keys nor scales. Just an island in the middle of an uncharted ocean. So he spreads out the fingers of his wide hands, pushes against Crowley’s narrow chest. 

_I want to explore you._

So he does. Crowley’s head snapped back into the pillows and the yellow eyes shut fast. (Crowley hates them, the yellow-sick of them. But Aziraphale knows they are not the color of jaundice, they are like grassfed butter set out on a plate with bread. They are like the yolk of a fresh poached egg. Like the sun, perhaps, a little too.) His curious tongue on the roadpath of the long throat. This taste of salt, the run of Crowley’s sweat. Aziraphale tastes, gathers up, in his mouth and his hands. _I want you, you’re so beautiful._

It’s not easy to say. Words come unbidden to our minds but we’re so so so used to swallowing them, it’s a bit of a jostle to spit. He forces himself to still. Holds Crowley there, his snapping hips, the tense jut of the jaw. Dips down to his ear, there in the earthred hair, says “Do you have any idea how gorgeous you are, my dear? You are so perfect, so entirely perfect -”

“Angel, you don’t have to say -”

Crowley’s never been good at shutting up, so Aziraphale bites his words off instead. Kisses him, this mouth to mouth. It doesn’t have to be said in language, this bit of worship, but he worships all the same. _Why was I so scared of you? I’m so sorry it took me this long (thank you for waiting, thank you, thank you). You never looked away, did you? You wouldn’t leave me, I know that now. I am so sorry. I love you. You’re not ready to hear that. (Are you? Should I say it? Would you say it back? I think you feel the same, I think that’s what you mean. I can’t tell. I think I can tell. Let me show you.)_

“Fucking hell, where did you learn that?”

“I’m just following you,” Aziraphale says, his hand moving slower and gentler, crop circles and alien signs. Sigils and hieroglyphics. He studies the rise and fall of Crowley’s chest with his hands, the dip and swell of the arms. Studying topography, making notes for drawing a map. This will be familiar ground later but the first time is always a discovery. _Where did you learn that?_ (It doesn’t matter, all mountains are different, all seas are strange.) 

“What do you want?” Crowley asks. Gasps, really. He’s struggling with air. They kiss and kiss and kiss, these mouths together, this new discovery (as if they were the first to figure it out).

“You,” he says.

“Stop being poetic. Tell me.” Crowley quirks a brow, props himself up on his elbows, his long and exploring fingers dipping into Aziraphale’s waistband like Magellan had struck out for the other side of the earth. _Let me see what I can find._

“Touch me, Crowley, please,” his eyes shut and tight and god, how he has wanted this and it’s so strangely hard to say and the way he has lain in bed for centuries (millennia) thinking of a quickdart tongue and the way those yellowdust eyes might look up at him with hollow cheeks and sweat-glazed brow and - “Take me in your mouth, please.”

Crowley blasphemes. (Aziraphale decides here and now, with one hand tugging the other to him and their mouths like a carcrash, that yes yes yes here he likes it. Here, in bed, he’ll allow it.) There is the creak of the bed, the shift, Crowley and his sink along Aziraphale’s soft chest, the rapture-touch. _Swallow me alive,_ Aziraphale wants to say. And Crowley does. His unhinged jaw opening wide, the long slide up the base. Taking him in, all in a single swallow. 

Aziraphale cries out. Claws at the sheets, moaning and wide. This red mess of hair between his thighs. Long-imagined. _Eat me alive, devour me. Take me in. Fill your mouth. Please._ “Fuck, darling, you’re perfect, that’s perfect, that feels incredible, how can you do this to me, oh my - “ 

This is dining, yes. Aziraphale knows how it’s done. He is vichyssoise licked from a spoon, he is the last bite of baked brie. He is a loaf of sourdough spread apart and Crowley has been starving all this time, yes, Aziraphale knows. He can feel it, being taken apart like a rack of ribs, the bones sucked down to bare one by one by one.

"I’m getting close,” he says, desperate and the sheets wet with sweat, one hand curled in Crowley’s red-dwarf hair and the eyebrow arched and the eyes, those fucking eyes, looking up at him hungry and soft too. This crowspit man who will make a nest of Aziraphale if he allows it (oh yes yes yes please). 

“Yes,” is all Crowley says. Gripping tighter, mouth and tongue pressed in. Aziraphale’s fingers tighten, everything tightens. This whitedark world behind his eyes and the sound of wind and rain and that first storm and all of them to come and _I love you I love you I love you_. 

How long is it before he comes to? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. The slow-stroke hands in his damp hair, the kiss behind his ear, soft on closed eyelids. The study of him (Crowley is making a map too). This quiet voice, said somewhere in a drumline heart, this _I love you I love you I love you_ twinned up in the rhythm of his own.


	6. This Bit Of Water In The Lungs

_[Prompt: Hurt/Comfort]_

_(Note of thanks to the quote used here from Anne Carson's translation of Euripides' Orestes. The use of the "I'll take care of you / It's rotten work / Not to me. Not if it's you.")_

* * *

_Yorkshire  
1153_

He is thinking of water. Dark water, the impossibility of light. The rate of water. How quickly can you fill in an empty hole, an empty space? Look at water, agile and quick and rushing into empty spaces and rising too too too fast. Filling up lungs too. Aziraphale is thinking about drowning in lakewater and is on his fourth ale of the night (drowning himself a bit too).

“Angel, fancy seeing you ‘round these parts.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, more to his mug than to the man next to him. “Not tonight. I’m in no mood for flippancy.”

“I’ve never been flippant in my life.” Crowley sits next to him. The two of them at the wood table and in the low light. The long hand signals for something, for any kind of ale. Doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Aziraphale doesn’t look up. He doesn’t look at the mess of long-hair next to him. Doesn’t look at the fall of a black cloak and the scrape of boots. He considers instead the grooves and damages to the wood, look at where mugs have been slammed and knives pointed and elbows placed to prop up half-sleeping heads. See the table. Don’t look at Crowley, sitting there and looking back. Aziraphale swallows a bit of drink, lifts it with still-shaking hands. They’ve been shaking for hours, these nervewrought hands. _I’ve spent too long here, I’ve gotten soft. Have I always been soft? I am a sword of Heaven. Is this wrong? This is wrong. I shouldn’t bother over this._

He is drowning, sitting here in open air and dry-clothed. Drowning with the ruin, with memory too. Where is the land? Deep in the water, who will find you?

Let me tell you what happened.

We are near to Semerwater. To what was once Semerwater. We have come here, deep into Yorkshire to follow an angel on Heaven’s orders. How had it gone? _Go, Aziraphale, and talk to the town. It is a wicked town. See who gives comfort and smite the rest. Drown them. Make them suffer. Go. It is Heaven’s wish. Don’t forget to expense your travels and have the report in by Monday for approval._ So, here Aziraphale had come to Semerwater and had taken the guise of a poor traveler, had gone in with tattered cloth and a grey and threadbare hat, two hands with nothing in them. Had said _can you spare some bread tonight or a bit of water?_ No one had, no one did but for an old couple on a hill. (He had known, he had known what was coming. God is ineffable, Heaven is not. They have an old playbook, they read old stories. Tell me of Baucis and Philemon, who had taken him in once and had been spared too. Aziraphale had wanted to yell, to cry out _they’re testing you, don’t you see, I’ve been warning you. Just a bit of bread, please, not for me. The waters are coming. Sandalphon is here, give me the bread, please. Please. Please._ ) 

It is over now.

Sandalphon had poured the floodwaters into the town, raising the lake too quickly for anyone to get out. Heaven and its miracles, Heaven and its righteous anger and here is Aziraphale who had _been_ there and had _walked_ those streets and _shaken_ those hands and there had been no bread, no, but there had been breathing lungs and seeing eyes and he had _touched_ those wattle-and-daub houses and blades of grass too (now underwater). He is sick with it, sick and dark, bleak with this seething ruin. This pit of him. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t move. Just this, staring at a bit of ale (a lot of ale) and getting _very very very very_ drunk tonight. 

A hand comes to his back. His shoulder. Warm and long-fingered. A well-known hand. 

“What do you need, angel?” Crowley asks, leaning in. He is not sprawled, as Aziraphale sees when he glances. Aziraphale looks quickly. Cautiously. A peripherally stolen look. Secret and safe. No, he sees that Crowley is leaning in, shoulders pointed like a perched hawk, the brow furrowed and the eyes as coaldark as Aziraphale’s twisted stomach, the razor wire of his mouth. The rawboned hand, a lesson in grief and ache, which should be heavy on his shoulder. It is light. Warm. 

“Does it get easier? Ever?”

What will a demon say? Laugh, most likely. Laugh at this sheep-soft man _pretending_ to be an angel. (He is a sword of Heaven. He takes the orders, follows the Plan. He is not soft, he is not, _he is not._ ) 

Crowley doesn’t laugh. There is a moment and then simply, “No.”

The hand stays there on his shoulder. The light doesn’t change, Crowley doesn’t move. Not really. Only the thumb as it makes slow circles there, pressed into Aziraphale’s skin. There are layers of fabric between them. But it doesn’t matter, there is this pressure, this promise of a rope. _I am drowning, toss me a rope. This length of you, let me hold onto you_. He can see the two of them reflected in a polished tankard, not far across. Sometimes, there are memories you make deliberately. You file them away saying, _yes yes yes this one is a favorite, yes, I will come back to this._ Mark it up, keep it safe. There they are in a bit of metal, Aziraphale and his worry-face, the loose net of his chin and his eelgrass-wobble mouth. Red-clay Crowley and his skinny-fingered grip, hand on a shoulder, like pulling a _man overboard_ from the sea. 

“What happened, angel? Tell me. Well, if that helps. You don’t have to, you know. I mean, whatever you need. You want to get outta here? I know a place that’s got the best roast lamb, you’d love it. You would. Great view, too, couldn’t ask for better. Right there on the Mediterranean. You’d go wild. You wanna do that?”

“No, thank you,” Aziraphale says, “Just stay for a bit? If that’s alright, of course, I don’t want to impose. It’s - rather been awhile, my dear.“ 

"Of course, anything. I’ll stay. Anything you need." 

"I’m so sorry to trouble you, it’s rotten work.” _(Staying here.)_

“Not to me." 

Aziraphale wonders what the last bit means. Is there something under it? We are masters of doublespeak. Saying one thing and trying not to say another. Tell me what you hear in it, tell me what you hear in my voice. Aziraphale wonders for a moment, just the briefest of indulged moments of _what do you mean by that_ and _is there something more_ and _oh, I shouldn’t even think about it, don’t be ridiculous._ (Worse still, _the are you a rope dropped into the sea? Can I reach for you?_ )

But there is a very warm hand on his shoulder and Crowley is dry as sand and a fire. Crowley has strong arms and strong hands holding him up to air out and dry and tell me how a drowned man cannot hear other things, siren whispers in soft words. This rush of _not to me_ which sounds so much like it could mean _it’s not rotten work, not to me,_ _not if it’s you._


	7. The Trouble With Apples

_[Prompt: Clothes sharing.]_

* * *

_2019_   
_London_

Eventually, the summer ends. Eventually, it is apple-season.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale says, that horrified mouth. “ _Look_ at this weather.” He looks down at himself, passing a hand over the beige waistcoat, his well-buttoned stomach. Those doubtful skybare eyes. “I’m not at _all_ dressed for this. This is a summer coat.”

Crowley turns around, black-denim arachnoid legs already half to the car. It is the type of weather that gets in your bones. Half-cold and humid, stealing deep into the marrow. The menace of rain there in the press of dark clouds. These God-terror clouds stacked on top of the Earth, pressing down like stones laid atop witches. Pressing in and cutting off the air. Crowley glares at the clouds. He hates rain. (That’s another story.) 

“You can borrow my jacket.” Crowley shrugs it off quickly, before Aziraphale agrees. Out of the black peel, holding it by long wire-hanger fingers. Offering it up like he had held out an apple once, same hand outstretched. Same mouth, different words. There is nothing of _taste this_ but only _wear this, it will keep you warm._

“Are you certain?”

“Absolutely. Just put it on, angel. Get in the car. We’ve got a reservation at seven. We’re gonna be late.”

_Just put it on. Wear me, wear it like my skin. Wear it like you wore my body once. Do you remember the inside of me? I remember you, I counted every vertebrae, mapped all your nerves and the capillaries too. Wear the jacket, it smells like me (dust, probably, and that shit aftershave, you know the one). I want you to wear me like you’re inside of me. Let me touch you, once removed. Six degrees of separation._

Aziraphale pauses, looks at the black coat hanging in the air. Offered up. Looks at Crowley again, his questiontroubled lip. But he does take the jacket. He slips it on over himself. Pulls the cave-black sleeves down, straightens the fit. 

“Don’t go making the collar tartan,” Crowley grouses.

“Tartan’s fashionable." 

"In 1857, sure.”

“I have taste,” Aziraphale says.

“You have a head injury.”

_Is it too much? This touch of me on you? Is it safe? You can’t go comparing wool to apples. They aren’t the same. Pull back the sleeve, let me see your skin. Show me that it is unmarked, unburnt. This is the trouble with apples. I had the bright idea to give something away once. Seemed good enough, an apple. Who regrets an apple? Seems like a good idea, offering an apple to someone looking for a spot of dinner. Didn’t expect that to backfire. So how is this different? You’re cold, in need of a coat. How is this different? (I could miracle one up. You could too. I need to know that this can touch you and not burn. Let me learn this. Please.)_

“How’s it fit?” (How does it feel?) 

“Quite well, my dear,” Aziraphale says in a quiet voice. Flung somewhere out across the ages. “Quite well. Warm. Comfortable.” A jacket warm from sturdy wool and a good lining. A bit of fabric still bearing body heat that is not Aziraphale’s own. 

“Course it’s _warm_ ,” Crowley mutters, shutting the car door behind Aziraphale. Opening his own. “That’s what you get for buying _quality_.”

He drives and thinks about skin. About Aziraphale in the next seat, prattling on about _ducks_ and _shortbread_ too. About Aziraphale’s warm skin against the inner lining of his coat. How Crowley’s own self had been there, his skin against it. How they are only interrupted by these small removals of fabric and time. Inconsequential nonsense, really. At dinner, Aziraphale orders tarte tatin and the server brings them two spoons, always the two spoons. Crowley doesn’t touch his spoon. Drinks the wine instead. Moves onto the port. Ruby port, a 1975 vintage and tasting like velvet gloves wrapped around his dryfuck tongue. He drinks coffee too. (Ignore the cream, ignore the sugar.) But he doesn’t think of port or coffee. He thinks instead about the tarte tatin on Aziraphale’s spoon, the soft-baked apples and the way they disappear into his mouth and his swallow-loud throat. He watches the way the eyes close at a perfectly-baked finish. Watches Aziraphale twists at the end, like a lover in bed and hands fisted in sheets, this self-satisfied little dance in the chair.

This trouble with apples. Wool too (he hadn’t realized).

_You took apples once. Here. From a server, from a cook. Not from my hand. That hasn’t hurt you. The coat doesn’t burn. Is this alright? (Can I touch you?) Should I say something? They’re not watching us, not anymore. They’re not sure what to make of us, our fireproof and waterproof selves. Should I do something? Your hand there. Do you want me to reach out? I think you might (I always overthink it). What if I’m making it up? You know what I mean, the way I think you look at me. What if it’s not what I think it is? Tell me._

He’s always always always getting it wrong. Tripping off clouds and into sulfur pools, troubling about apples. _Not this one. I can’t fuck this up._ So he lifts his jaw and downs the rest of the wine in the bottom of the glass, taking it far past his scythe-cut mouth. Letting it burn. 

Aziraphale smiles at him. Bright and heavenfaced and this hair the color of bookpages and his newsprint-dark pupils and that soft strangeness that seems to say _yes yes yes one of us must say it, shall you go first or shall I?_ They could sober up. They should sober up. But they don’t. Crowley wants to stay here, to stay here always. Here, in this liminal space of drunkenness where we edge too close to _maybe_ and too far from _this isn’t a good idea._ Yes, leave the car and walk back to the bookshop. (He’ll get the car later. It’s not as important. A spare miracle.) Aziraphale pulling on the blackdark jacket again, wearing Crowley like a skin, this embezzled touch. He walks Aziraphale to the door. 

Only lovers stand like this, so close, sizing up each other’s mouths and thinking of solving puzzles. _Can I?_ (He doesn’t.) _Will you?_ (Aziraphale doesn’t.) 

“Do you want a nightcap?” Aziraphale says, low and odd. 

_Yes._ “I should get back. Got things. You know, things. That I have. To do.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll come bother you tomorrow.”

“You don’t bother me, Crowley.”

He squirms a little, looking away. Counts the bricks in the walls and the dead moths at the door. “You know what I mean, angel. See you tomorrow.”

Get away, doubleback. You’re out of time.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale calls from the step, “Your jacket.” Aziraphale there, brighthaired in the space of the open door to the quiet shop, this interruption in the night. There are car lights around and shops too but he is there, angelbright and offensively incandescent. 

He’s already walking. One foot in front of the other. _Get it together._ He waves over his shoulder, calling back to the shop and the apple-coring man there in the space of the door, “Keep it. I’ll get it tomorrow, angel.”

That’s the trouble with apples. He’d never gotten to eat of the apple, to bite into the skin, tear the wet flesh of it. This difference of good and evil. Of good idea and bad idea. _Tell me what the right choice is, what the correct step is. God, tell me what you need, what you want. Tell me what to do._


	8. Up To The Coasts Of Light

_[Prompt: Interaction with long hair.]_

* * *

_London  
2020_

_I like this best,_ he thinks. This press of morning, still yet silent. This hot-coal warmth of Crowley against him, still even-breathed in sleep. There is nothing of angles of him in sleep, nothing of tension. Aziraphale knows, he watches. Over his books and past the edges of pages, he keeps an eye out. See Aziraphale here, his back against the headboard, the soft flannel shirt. See the cottongentle shift of the eyes and mouth, the way we betray ourselves in love when we think no one is looking. (This morning, it is only him awake in the world.) 

_It’s you, it’s you. It’s always been you._ Memorize the moment, the knots of them here, wrinkled sheets and a half-fallen throw. He’ll need to head to the bookshop later, catalog inventory and get the mail. But not yet. Not just yet.

He does not call the bookshop _home_. Not anymore.

I am going to talk to you about home. Addresses too, though that’s the thing. Walls and floors don’t matter. We’ve never given a damn for plaster or paint. It’s about this, you and I. This little room. Let’s look. Aziraphale and the pale morning, the sun past the heavy curtains. He reaches a hand out, curls it into Crowley’s redbrick hair. It is soft and fine, a bit damp from sweat. It shines a little, right where the sun touches it. It is a bit wild at the edges, a little untrimmed. Well, very untrimmed. Desperately needing a cut. A shore-up. But there’s more of it to touch, so Aziraphale quietly prefers it this way, wild and strange. This flamelick hair. He has always loved Crowley’s hair. Always. 

(Do I need to tell you how long _always_ is? Yes, let’s go back in time. I think I do.)

It didn’t start in Eden. Not exactly. There had been the wide tundra of Before. Before the Garden. Lovers like to look back to the start, to say _show me exactly, I want to watch again from the beginning. Let’s rewind. Tell me the story again, you and I. How I fell in love with you (and you with me)._ They had never spoken in Heaven but Aziraphale still remembers the long tangle of red-dark hair, this mess of it over a shoulder, against a bit of pale linen. He still remembers his own itching hands and he hadn’t loved this angel that would become Crowley but he had just seen the hair, the unyellow eyes, had said _oh, you’re something. Why are you so familiar? You’re beautiful._ They had not spoken, had never spoken. Not then, not in Heaven. That had come later. It had not been until somewhere in Eden, long before we knew the story of snakes. It had started on an afternoon under a blue sky and on a tussock of grass. Aziraphale had been dozing, had still had a little bit of fig there, stuck in the corner of his mouth. His pomegranate-stained fingers (he had hidden them quickly in his robes). 

“Oi, you there,” the new arrival had said. “Got any idea where the kids went?”  
  
Aziraphale had blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

To-be Crowley had tilted his head, that long hair falling against his shoulder. Aziraphale had wanted to reach out, to brush it away. (He hadn’t. You do not just blithely reach over and tuck a bit of apple-red hair behind someone’s ear. Not anyone, not _this_ anyone.) “Adam and Eve. Got a message. Well, it’s more a script, really.” He pulls a face. “Though Gabriel doesn’t know shit about shit. Gonna liven it up a bit. Lot of _thees_ and _thous_ in there and you _know_ everyone tunes that mess out.”

“What kind of message?”

“‘Sposed to tell them to keep an eye out, you know? Pretty sure Hell’s about to wise up to this whole Earth-lark and they’ll find some way to cause trouble. So I’m supposed to talk about the Fall and Lucifer. Stuff like that. Nothing important. Not like they’ll remember. I mean, do you remember any of the assemblies about it? Staff meetings? You ever read the handouts? I don’t.”

“No,” Aziraphale says, frowning slightly. Thinking back to stacks of pages left untouched. Unread. _Memos About Personnel Change._

“My point exactly,” not-quite-Crowley says. And goes off to give advice (and follow none of it). You see, this is what we haven’t said, Crowley had been the last to Fall.

The next time Aziraphale had found him, he had slithered up on a garden wall. This red-bellied snake. The serpentine curve of his spine. This demon in red hair and this _oh, it’s you. You’re different. What’s happened? Do you remember? How did it happen? No, please, what have you done?_ But that was a long time ago. And this is not about Heaven (or Hell either, for that matter). This is about here. This bed, this drape of Crowley in soft sheets and his warm thigh over Aziraphale’s leg and this soft breath of sleep. Crowley stirs slightly under the hand in his hair, this movement over him. Touching him.

“Mmm,” he says, “Mornin’.”

“Good morning,” Aziraphale says. _Good morning, I love you._ “Your hair is getting long, darling.”

“Yeah, yeah, does that,” Crowley murmurs, still sleep-drunk and his face smashed into the pillow. “If you let it.”

Aziraphale frowns, reaching down to the nape where it’s beginning to curl. “Are you growing it out?”

“Might be.” One yellow eye pops open. (Like Byzantine gold, like turmeric too.) “You know. Trying it out.”

“I always love your hair.” _I saw you first with long hair. I have never touched it long. Let me. Oh, I’ve wanted to. For ages. Centuries. Millennia too._

Crowley’s mouth and that wicked curl, that divine curl. That bite of the lower lip, that raise of the aqueduct brow (dark as iron-gall ink and hidden places too). “Yeah, angel? You love it? What else do you love?”

_You._

Aziraphale laughs, lets himself be pulled by long arms to a skinny-barrel chest and a warm press of a mouth and these half-slit eyes. This laugh, let us always wake up laughing. Aziraphale laughs because there is nothing of Heaven here and nothing of Hell. Tell me about home. Tell me about where we sleep, where we make and remake ourselves. _We can go off together,_ Crowley had said once, standing in a bandstand with skywide-open arms. Let’s look closer. What does that mean? It means that this flat is nothing, that London is nothing too. That we are not looking to the past. No one is reaching for brimstone nor nectar, no. It means _it’s you, it’s been you all along. You are the place in the world where I make my home. You are my address, my backyard, my living room. Let me make a bed of you and I together. Curl up in me. When I write my address out, it is only your name written here, on an ID card and carved into my ribs. Where do I live? In you, with you (and you in me). Let me write it here, your name, over and over and over._

Tell me where you find home. (Mine is here in the palm of your hand.)


	9. Tender At The Bone

[Prompt: Craving.]

* * *

_London_   
_2019_

“Just get the steak, Crowley. You’ll like it, it comes with this _wonderful_ béarnaise sauce.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Aziraphale frowns. “You never eat. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this place, my dear. Not just to hear me prattle.”

“Prattle on, angel,” Crowley shrugs. “I mean, the wine’s good.” It’s not just the wine. He likes the feel of the place too. _Ambiance_ , Aziraphale had called it in that particular tone of his. He likes the way Aziraphale likes the place, the hushed relief of the shoulders, the perk of the mouth. 

“Of _course_ the wine’s good.”

Yes, the wine’s good. The food’s good too, from what Crowley can tell of Aziraphale and his strange little noises, these self-satisfied pats of a cloth napkin, the pleased set of the fork at the end. Aziraphale and this restaurant, this one, The Ritz. _Their_ restaurant. The menus placed before them. Menus. Pick something, anything you like. Order it. 

(What’s on the menu? Look closely, is it what you’re looking for? What have you wanted? What do you need?)

_The thing is, if you were on it, I wouldn’t know what to order. I want you like an appetizer, I want you at the beginning and perfectly composed. Elegantly placed upon a plate. I want you like an entree, so much more of you. Perhaps, if you were an entree, they’d give me a knife too. I could better dig in that way, into the meat of you. (Might just give up fork and knife together, hold you to my mouth, my bare and half-starved mouth. The teeth of me, the skin of you.) Be my dessert too. I don’t want to end on anything else. Carry me into the night. (I don’t want to end at all. I’ll keep you on my tongue all night long. Dare me, try me. I will, I swear I will.)_

It’s easier when he’s not drunk. But he’s drunk now and hungry too. And there’s Aziraphale, sitting across from him. Just past this interval of white linen. Past this seascape of fabric and empty plates and a cup of coffee. Aziraphale, hungry and scraping at his plate. _Here,_ Crowley wants to say, _try this._ He could offer his hands, his neck, his mouth. But they’re not on the menu. We need to be careful of cravings, need to carefully be aware of impulses. Crowley is very careful. He watches Aziraphale’s open mouth instead, the swallow at the neck. The cloudjunk of his hair, this absurd cumulus-strand hair. 

_I want you. Fuck, I shouldn’t. This isn’t right. (Is it?) Tell me. Should I tell you? Is it okay? Tell me. You still have my jacket, don’t you? Where do you keep it? Is it in your closet? On the coat rack? On the hook by the kitchen? (Do you ever wear it? Do you try to smell me? I miracled it to smell like me for weeks. It should still. I need to know.)_

There is a slight jostle. Aziraphale and his napkin, patting at his face post-creme brulee. His hand on the stem of a glass, that half-drunk and impish light to what _should be_ (and are) heavenly eyes. And there’s the move of a well-muscled leg below the table. Nothing too much. Nothing too forward. Nothing warm. Just this accidental shoe-to-shoe. Aziraphale probably thinks it’s just wood, just the table leg. But Crowley knows. He knows.

“I was wondering,” Aziraphale says, “About after?”

“What do you mean _after_?” Crowley says. Blinks, even (though you cannot tell it behind those dark shades). 

“Well, no more tempting. No more blessing. What do you - want to do now? You must have ideas, my dear.”

Crowley has _ideas_. None of them should be voiced. So, he drinks instead. Buys time. _Breathe, one, two, three, four_. “Haven’t thought about it.” (He has. It’s not on the menu.)

Aziraphale hesitates. “I was thinking - well, I’ve always thought. Well, I rather like the ocean and if I don’t need to be on hand for miracles - ”

“Where?” Crowley says. He winces a little, knowing it comes out sharp as a razor. Sharp as shattered shells on bare feet. 

“Pardon?" 

"Where are you going?”

Aziraphale looks at him. One hand still on the winestem, the ocean-foul eyes wide and unblinking. This perhaps-pity of the whole thing. _I’m so sorry,_ his body says, though his mouth hasn’t quite caught up, _I’m going away._ “I’ve always been fond of the South Downs. Rather figured I’d go there someday, if I hadn’t anything keeping me.”

Crowley stays perfectly still. “Right, yeah. Nice place. Seems good.” Aziraphale would love it there, he knows that. He can see it already. The village newspaper and the small cottage to inevitably follow. Walks in the morning. Cups of tea and pale sunlight. His laughable garden. (Aziraphale has never been a gardener, doesn’t know how to really inspire the proper _spirit_ in the things.)

Not on the menu. Just a craving. You can ignore it. It’s a sin to give in (he is an expert on this). Forget lust and gluttony. Don’t think about this, the space between your fingers, the starving emptiness of your mouth. Don’t think about the _years._ Don’t think about the fact that Crowley knows, that we always know, cravings are passing things. We indulge a craving, we wait for it to move on. A wave against the shore, it comes and goes and changes nothing. You can ignore a craving. Cravings do not last millennia.   
  
(This is not a craving. Tell me about need. A desert-mouth and the rain) 

He watches the wallpaper, wondering if he’s ever noticed the particular pattern before.

“ _Crowley,_ ” Aziraphale says, “Are you listening?”

“Sorry, angel. What?”

“I said,” Aziraphale says, pauses. His watercolor-red cheekbones, the tips of the ears too. He looks away and Crowley doesn’t follow the look. He just watches for once, drunk-frank and obvious. The bump on the nose, the skysomething-blue of the eyes. (He’s wine-drunk and has never been a poet, forgive him.) Look at the opening there at the starched collar. Look at the wheatfield of the jacket and the waistcoat too. Look at the shoulders and arms. They had taken his jacket two weeks ago. Crowley’s deepwater-dark jacket. The one that smells like his shampoo and his aftershave, his favorite coffee, his preferred whiskey. Miracled in this idea, this absurd idea, that Aziraphale might notice. Might wear it. Might sleep in it (if he ever takes to sleep). _Make a memory of me. A treasure of me. I would wear yours. Wear mine. Please._

“I _said_ ,” Aziraphale goes on, looking back and catching his focus. Holding it there. Pinned like a dead butterfly to a wall. An entomologist’s stare. “If I hadn’t anything keeping me.” Then, quieter still. “Do I have anything - anything keeping me?”

His mouth open, his breath gone. _What are you asking me? You cannot be asking me this. Tell me. Don’t expect me to know._ “What the hell are you on about?”

And Aziraphale’s eyes are shining and yes, they have had too much to drink, and yes, this is a bad idea, and yes, they both know it (of course they do). But there is always the moment of flinging yourself out into the deep. All divers must weigh the shore against the sea. All captains must go down with their ships. The water is wide and craving, yes. (Aziraphale must taste like cream now and sugar too. Espresso. Crowley hasn’t had anything but wine and coffee and he is _starving,_ he is _craving,_ can you call this craving? It has been so _long_ , goddammit.) 

“Come back to the shop with me, my dear,” Aziraphale whispers. Too low for any respectable reason. (They are neither of them respectable.) “I have some scotch. To tempt you with.” And that damnable foot, that damnable leather-shoed foot presses closer against his own and there is the knock of a trousered knee and there is the heat of a thigh and _yes yes yes of course, how could you expect anything else?_

“Anything you like, angel,” he says, mustered from nowhere and nothing. Dry-tongued and desperate as a man in a desert so long ago, walking away in the first rain and wet hair stuck to his face, his blinking yellow-dust eyes, and yes, tell me about a desert in the rain and hungry hands too. _Anywhere you like. Tell me where, tell me when. Tell me how fast, tell me how slow. Tell me what you have on the menu, what I can order. I’ll order it all. Doesn’t matter, anything you like._

We can go off together. (Just tell me when that’s something printed here, on this menu in my hands. Tell me when I can order it.)


	10. Silverskin

_[Prompt: Mercy]_

* * *

  
  
(I know what you’re looking for. We’ve come too close. Let’s step back a moment, look back. You see, this has been ages. There is so much more to tell.)

_New York City  
1919_

_Say what you want about London, this smells like a dead rat’s been left to fester for a week. And it’s covered in skunk cabbage._ Crowley isn’t wrong, it does smell awful. Worse than New York usually smells in the summer, that sweatpit muck of the place. It is worse here in the improvised hospital, moving through the makeshift beds, scenting the bit of gauze and old bloodsweat and this wreck of men, here, infected and ruined. It smells like death. 

There are many miracles in the world and kindnesses too. We never talk about the butcher’s kindness. We never talk about strong and gentle hands, about the care of a black bit of fabric placed over our eyes so that we might not see. We never say _thank you_ to the knife and those who are quick with it. 

Crowley is very tired. Even with a fairly recent near-century-long nap, it doesn’t matter. It’s that sort of tired that crawls in the marrow, that settles into the folds of your brain. You can’t shake it out. Can’t dig it out. This tired sticks between his teeth and there’s no toothpick to wrench it out. No. He moves his bleakfeathered self through the rows of beds. His jangling nerves and hypotenuse elbow here, walking past too many beds. Not even the dignity of walls nor curtains between them, just these men laid out on bleached-white sheets, drowning in their own lungs, lied to by the air. This pandemic, this rotwretch sick of the thing. The trouble in the lungs, the cytokine storm. 

Spanish Flu. (Who sent this? Where did it come from?)

At the end of the row of beds, at the end of _this_ row of beds (there are many), is a man as white as the bleach-nothing sheets. Cataract-pale. The worry of Aziraphale’s face is deeper, the furrow of his brow cavern-sunk. You’re a wreck. (So am I.) 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, smoothing his face like he might a bit of crumpled paper. Brightening just the touch. Crowley misses nothing in the way his name is said, the way it falls from Aziraphale’s mouth as it had once in the Bastille. His name said like _you’re here, thank god, you’re the only one I wanted to see._

“What a bloody mess,” Crowley says.   
  
“This. And a war,” Aziraphale says. “Feels like the End Times.”

Crowley quirks a brow. “Yeah, well. We’ll at least have a heads up for those. Boiling seas making fish stew of the whole thing and all.“ 

"Cioppino,” Aziraphale says, distant but softer. 

“I mean, if you throw _tomatoes_ in the ocean. I guess.” He pauses, “Don’t get any _ideas_ , angel. I’ll take you out to dinner if it comes to that.”

Aziraphale laughs, that half-sad thing there, this _thanks for taking my mind off this. Just for this moment._

“You rang?” Crowley wants to put a hand out, there on the hill-soft shoulder. In the lightcatch hair. He doesn’t. Curls his fingers tight instead, there in the close of a pocket.

“I can’t - ” Aziraphale says and stops. Crowley already knows. As soon as Aziraphale had opened his mouth, he knew. We learn each other intimately, the stops and starts of ourselves. The things said and unsaid. Aziraphale cannot say it and so Crowley knows exactly what is being said. Strange how that works. These words rolling on an unoffered tongue of _please, I can’t save them all. Heaven’s watching and that’s too many miracles and Death must have its due anyway (no one runs forever)._

There are kind hands made of cleavers. We don’t realize it when we’re young. There’s black and white, right and wrong, life and death. Good, yes, and evil too. It seems so obvious then. But this is before we learn about ache and that bully-march of time. This is before we wake up blinking one morning, realizing that the light looks different and that our fingers have changed. That there are wrinkles in the mirror and that we will never be young again. (That chapter is closed, over forever. How does it feel to be a life half-read? All stories end.) 

So then we learn of butcher-kindness and that mercy is not always black and white. _Will you be merciful?_ Aziraphale seems to say but does not say. _For me? Because I need you to? Take this from me, I know I ask too much of you._ Crowley hears it and sets his hat down on the wood-bench. Sucks in his breath. _You will never ask too much of me. You cannot. Not you._

“I’ve got you, angel, don’t worry." 

"Are you sure? I mean, it’s so much to ask.”

“Tell you what. Meet me later.”

“When?”

Crowley shrugs. “I hear the bridge down there is pretty wild to see. That one they did to Brooklyn. I’d like to knock a few spitballs off of it.”

“ _Crowley_ ,” Aziraphale and his scandalized smile. Saying _Crowley_ like you might say _thank you, thank you, thank you._

“Tomorrow?” (They never meet two days in a row. Never. _Say yes, angel. Please._ )

“Yes, my dear. I would like that,” he says. Looks away, biting his lower lip. Smoothing down the lapels of the bandage-beige coat. Crowley is grateful for dark lenses, hiding the wretched obviousness of himself. He shrugs, shifts. Lifts his bandsaw jaw up and breathes in. This is the butcher’s merciful touch. The gardener and his pruning shears. Be quick and firm. Strike once, as loving as a guillotine. We cannot run forever. Crowley and his hellstain, already spotted and sea-damp. Already soiled. Might as well be the dispatcher, the executioner too. Someone must. Someone with strong hands and a stronger stomach, with softcut eyes and his hair as red as this fever-pink wreck of their faces. This is the only kindness he gets to give. 

“You’re always so good - ”

“Angel,” he hisses, “Do not.” _Don’t get me in trouble. Don’t tell the management team what’s up. (Don’t tease me with this, your bit of goodness. This something of you. Hope, maybe. Don’t.)_

Tell the butcher _thank you_ when you see him. For his knifecut mercy and tell him _thank you_ for keeping his moth-yellow eyes open and his boneskinny hands steady. Tell him _thank you_ for measuring twice and only striking once. 


	11. The Flowers Cover Over Everything

_[Prompt: Rings]_  
  
A note on influences. I have drawn from listening to The Magnetic Fields’ cover of The Book of Love here and Carol Ann Duffy’s incredible poem, Valentine. The title is taken from a line in The National’s Not In Kansas.

* * *

_A Cottage On The South Downs  
2029_

_“S_ top _encouraging_ them,” Crowley says, batting Aziraphale away from indulging the roses.

“Well, if you could be reasonable.”

Once upon a time, there was a garden. Once upon a time, there will be a garden again. Aziraphale had fallen in love with a gardener once, long ago (still now, all this time later). 

Love is a perennial. An evergreen. There is a time to prune but we never grow a garden for the benefit of the shears. Why do you plant a garden? To watch it grow. To smell roses too (and lilac, if you like). Crowley scowls at Aziraphale and his overpermissive fingers there, touching leaves and vines and petals as if they’re _remotely_ worthy of his praise. But Aziraphale loves the plants, even if he’s not the keeper of them. He loves to sit with them and with his book. To watch them grow. To watch all things grow.

They are growing here, into this new cottage and new garden. Bringing the boxes in, putting their names down. It has been ten years since Aziraphale had first brought up getting a cottage in the South Downs, had first mentioned it nervously at The Ritz. They have gotten here now (and have finally gotten a proper kettle too).

_Let me see you, let me watch you unfurl to the sun. This is how I love you. The mess of you and the mess of me. I ask nothing of you but to grow here, with me in this patch of black soil. I have vines, let me reach for you. (You have roots, put them down, put them down here please.)_

This is the secret that the movies don’t show. That the books don’t say. Love changes when it’s finally come through the soil, but we don’t cherish a tree less than a seed. _I love you like an oak tree, strong-boughed and wide-branched, yes. I love you with dark and sunhungry leaves. I can love you like this and it is beautiful, just as beautiful in the tenth year as on the first day. (Hearts are strong, I will never tire. It won’t falter.)_

“What do you want to do for dinner?” Crowley asks, yawning, leaning against a doorframe. Aziraphale watches his corded body, his ropelength spine against the wood. _Don’t trouble yourself, my love. It’s been a long day._

“Bit tired, my dear. All that unpacking, of course. Who would have thought a box of books was so heavy? Anyway, I thought we might stay in?”

Crowley reaches out, a long set of fingers tucked into Aziraphale’s hair. His hair as white as Cistercian robes, white as the cliffs of Dover too. (They can touch now. They are making up for six-thousand years of lost time.) “Mmm yeah, alright. You want me to cook something?”

“If you’re up for it. Don’t go to too much trouble, Crowley.” Aziraphale frowns a little. “Have we unpacked the kitchen things?”

Crowley waves his hand, smirking. “It took a miracle but yeah, we have.” He winks, grinning. 

“You’re incorrigible.“ 

The kitchen is a miracle. Pristine, perfectly put away. The dishtowels folded there and also hung on the oven door. Aziraphale with a glass of wine, a Beaujolais this time, sipping quietly while Crowley gets out the cutting boards and the knives. Garlic and onions too. Aziraphale loves widely, yes, both angelically and humanly. Who does not tumble into love at the smell of garlic and onions there, sauteed with a bit of oil in a hot pan? Crowley’s long hands tuck well into the onion, his knuckles against the blade. Careful and quick. He slices the onion into perfectly-even rings. Saturn-rings. Thin and steady (Crowley has always been steady, really. If you know how to look.) 

_Let me give you rings._

“Crowley?”

“Hmm?” He is focused, head-down and mincing garlic. It has been ten years since the near-Apocalypse. Ten years of this, this quiet something that they simply _do_ and never quite _talk_ about. They don’t name it but there’s nothing of discomfort. What name do you give to this? What word suffices? How do you package this up with a word, the two of them together? Aziraphale looks at the pile of cut onions. Takes one. _Oh._ “Oi,” Crowley slaps his hand gently, “I _need_ those. Get your peckish hands out.” 

Aziraphale holds the onion, turning it back and forth. Crowley rolls his eyes, his broomstick-thin mouth and the curl at the edge. Pushes a pile of diced tomatoes toward Aziraphale. Tomatoes and parsley too. (It’s a _tradition_ , you see. Part of the dance. Aziraphale always snags bits from Crowley’s prep board and Crowley says _angel, get your damn hands out, I swear, I am warning you._ But Crowley also always cuts extra, always makes extra, knowing that angelic fingers _do_ like to wander.) 

“Thank you, my love. Oh, this just smells delicious.”

“Just a bit of onions and garlic,” Crowley says, moving his head to toss his now-long tumble of Mars-red hair over his shoulder. (It has been ten years, he’s grown it long again. You know what I said about hungry and wandering angelic hands. They get into these redtangles too.) “Can you hand me the tomato paste?”

“Of course,” Aziraphale says. Reaches across the counter. Passes it. 

It’s this, you know. This quiet domesticity. This soft light of the fall of the sun, the summer outside the open windows, the catch of the breeze in the leaves out there beyond glass. _It’s you, it will always be you. You’re the other bit of me, you seal me up. I don’t want excitement, there is passion even in cardboard boxes and supper. In mail on the table, in laughing over your wild morning hair. I want you all the mornings. And the evenings. All of it together._ Aziraphale recognizes this, this feeling of having been an open parenthesis without the other to finish the thought. A single quotation mark left adrift and all of his words and thoughts had been _spilling_ out and there had been _nothing_ to catch him, nothing to hold him steady. Nothing. Until now, this curve of quotation-mark Crowley (bent here over a counter, head down and softsmiling, focused). _You catch all of me, you keep me safe. I love you. Can I be terribly embarrassing about this? I know you hate “sop”. You will hate it, won’t you, if I ask? If I ask you this, will you squirm and laugh it off? It’s okay if you do (I hope you don’t)._

“I’ve been thinking,” Aziraphale says, gentle and hoping his voice isn’t too unsteady, “About something.”

“About what?”

“Just, oh, I don’t know. I’m not needing anything, mind, I know that we’ve already settled everything. But what with the new cottage and all -” He stops and inhales. Closes his skypale eyes. Brings the smell of a hand-cooked meal into his lungs, the smell of unpacked cardboard boxes and new paint and _Change of Address_ forms. There’s nothing of terror here, just this this this _I hope you don’t mind. Let me do this one. You give me everything (I’d love to give you a wedding ring.)_

Crowley stops the knife. A bird calls. The sky is the color that the painters love, deep blue and wine-dark. “What is it?”

“How do you feel about - well, a ring?” The onion there, sharp against him. Knifecut. 

I don’t need to tell you the ending. Of the cutting board set to the side, the knife placed in the sink. Of this rounding of a kitchen island and the press of a comet-burnt demon. These hands on the side of Aziraphale’s face and the mouth against him, familiar and beloved. A book read over and over and over again. There is no quoting of this _yes yes yes yes fuck I love you_ because it is said thousands of times and never to air but poured here into Aziraphale’s very mouth and against his closed eyelids and his stretched-out neck. They will forget dinner tonight but food keeps. We will grow more of it, in one garden or another. It doesn’t matter, we’ll eat later. Only this, their tangleroot hair, this garden at the end of the world, the blacksoil beneath their fingernails. 

Let us plant what we love, plant a garden here. Tell me what you hope to grow in the soil of me and you.


	12. Come With Me From Lebanon

_[Prompt: "Unforgivable. That's what I am." cf. "I forgive you."]_

_Note: The title is taken from the NIV trans. of the Song of Solomon._

* * *

_London  
2019_

“What did you mean by that?” ****

“By what, my dear boy? I can’t read your mind, you know.”

“That _I forgive you_ rubbish. That bunk .“ 

Aziraphale pauses, the glass stilled in his hand, midway on the journey to his mouth. ”…You were apologizing, weren’t you?“

“I was _trying_ to get you to get in the car,” Crowley mutters. He drops his head back on the impossible sofa. The _impossible_ sofa with the _impossible_ lumps and this _impossible_ man here across from him (slipping down a bit now, after a few glasses of wine, into a wingback chair). His hair is red as war against the dull brown of the thing.

_You don’t get to forgive me. Unforgivable, that’s what I am. And it isn’t yours to forgive. That’s what we’re really talking about here, isn’t it?_

_“You were an angel once.”_

Fuck, it sticks in his throat. _That was a very long time ago._ It is always there, isn’t it? That residue of angel? The brimstone-wreck of the Fall sticking to him too. Like mold, like rot, like the smell of wet laundry left too long in the wash. The putrid Fall cemented to him like a zebra mussel on the hull of a ship. _How do I smell to you?_ Sour milk probably. Rotten egg, this sulfur-stench of him. _Do you remember me? From Before the Fall? I remember you, I remember seeing you in Eden. It was my first time in town, my first time meeting you. You had fig on you and pomegranate on your hands (you didn’t think I noticed). Do you remember my name, the color of my eyes? They weren’t always this, this yellowfat, this corpse-bloat sick. They were green once, I was a gardener and they were green. (I am still a gardener but indoors, inside. Potted plants only. No green. Not to me.)_

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“Easy for you to say, you don’t have to take the express elevators downstairs.”

Aziraphale is quiet. Crowley glares at his glass. He’s mucked it all up again, hasn’t he? Going on and blathering when he should have just _shut up, shut the fuck up._ His tongue has always been too fumbling or clever for its own good and he just wants to _grab_ it sometimes, right there in his hands, grab it and say _sit still awhile, will you? Stop fucking everything up._ The thing is - it isn’t even Hell. It isn’t Heaven either. He’s never been fond of either one, not really. (He’s sick of ambrosia still, all this time later. Trust the Americans to try to recreate it on Earth.) He’s just never quite fit in here nor there, neither place quite right. Couldn’t ever settle. Not until this strange and flung-out experiment on a bit of rock. This bit of earth. 

Strange earth. Strange creatures.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, sitting up and oh, he’s got that look in his bluepoint eyes, that one that says _I am going to steer this ship and you are coming with me, my dear, come heaven or high water._ Aziraphale and his aggressive empathy and Crowley already feels the itch up his spine and between the spread of his shoulders, the twitch of his feet saying _I need to get out of here, let me be anywhere but here. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. (Not with you.)_ “Crowley,” he says again, “There is nothing to forgive. We don’t know the Plan.”

 _Right, the fucking Plan again._ Crowley glares at the glass, regretting that it isn’t a scrap of ivy, that there are no leaves to bully here. 

“And even, beyond the Plan,” Aziraphale goes on, “Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t, I should sober up. We both should. But my dear, you must understand that - well, you’re quite right just as you are.” He settles back a bit and then repeats quietly, as if he hasn’t quite grasped it himself, “Just as you are.”

Crowley quirks a nightdark brow, popping his head up from the couch and looking over. Aziraphale’s hair is stormwild. (A drunk Aziraphale is an Aziraphale with a tendency to let his hands run through his hair, to touch his face often, as if he is trying to rub the drink from cloudy eyes.) “What?”

“Oh, you _know_ what I mean. Don’t be a bother. Anyway, you shouldn’t punish yourself so much.”

This exaggerated grin, a parody of a leer. “Angel, I _never_ punish myself.”

“My dear, you’re a bloody _monk_. I’ve _been_ to your flat. The only sin you ever manage is sloth." 

Crowley squawks, indignant. "Hey now,” he gestures wildly with a glass still partly-full (much less full a moment later, splashed on the floor and his pantleg too). “I am a fucking _champion_ of pride." 

He doesn’t miss Aziraphale’s well-rolled eyes. "You couldn’t manage pride if it wore a saddle.”

Crowley scowls, muttering something about _horses_. Aziraphale leans back half in the warm Tungsten light of the tablelamp. The side table buried in books and treasures. The sleeves of his sweater rolled up. Cream sweater and milk skin. The worry lines of his face relaxed a little here, in this quiet bubble of the two of them together, this room above the shop. Crowley’s focus wanders, just a little here. (He has wandered long and wandered often, usually in deserts and often thirsty. He’s used to it. Doesn’t matter.) Where does it go? Just a question of mouths and skin. A question of taste. Of dry lips. Velocity. There is an old question about two trains having left their stations. The stations flung out very far from one another. They are headed toward the middle, one going West and one going East. But they are traveling at different speeds. When will they meet? _Here, this old equation. Give me a hint, give me something. The velocity here, of this train (I know the other, I have my foot on the pedal, I can change it too.). Tell me what the speed is, let me solve for X._

"You could let me show you how to enjoy things, you know." 

"Wait, hold the goddamn phone. Are you suggesting you’ll _tempt_ me, angel? What are you, the bleeding guidebook of sin?”

“Crowley, don’t be absurd. I simply mean going to a restaurant and actually _eating_ once in a while. Doing something because you enjoy it, not simply because you should or because you shouldn’t and, oh blast it all, I’m not saying it right. I only mean that I met monks in Glastonbury, very holy men too, and they enjoyed their lives more than you do. You’re an ascetic, my dear.”

“I am not.”

“You’re pouting.”

“No such thing. Demons don’t pout.”

Aziraphale and that absurd, wondrous, indulgent smile. That knowing lift of the brows and shine in the eye. “I rather have proof they do and it’s currently draped on my sofa.” He lifts the bottle, miracles away the spill. Refills both their glasses with the tannic red. “You don’t have to punish yourself. Not forever. Not ever.”

Crowley doesn’t look up. Who could? The tips of his ears are hot and he bites the inside of his mouth because it’s the only meat he can tear at (he’ll take what he is given). _You can’t just sit there, heavenfaced and drunk, telling me I’m forgivable. You cannot. Do you have any idea? Do you know what I would do to you? To everything? Do you know what’s in here, what I keep away from you? You wouldn’t say these things, not if you knew. You have no idea. Do you remember me? Is that why you’re saying this? (I hope you don’t, you cannot. Please. I am not that person anymore. There is nothing of heaven in me.)_

He changes the subject. “You need some green in here. A little life. Something other than a bunch of dead authors and their old opinions. Liven the place up a little." 

Aziraphale blinks, looking around at the shelves and the little collections of things. His row of fountain pens and inks (India ink these days, never iron gall). At the carvings and the wax almadels. The Foucault pendulum there on his desk, silently watching the world turn. "Oh, do you think? Is there enough light?”

Crowley shrugs. “Could try it, you know. For a bit with some low-light ones. I’ll watch them, you won’t have to do a thing.”

“Won’t we kill them though? Poor things, I’d hate to - ”

“Nah, angel. You see, when there isn’t enough light, their leaves just go a bit yellow. Right? Pop them back in the light and then, bam, there you have it, they’re green again and good to go." 

Crowley knows about light. You must be careful of light, monitor the light. Too much can kill a living thing, exposure is a danger to all creatures. To all plants. Too little can ruin you too. Let us find the middle ground, let us look for where we come together, here in a careful balance. I have been telling you about light, you see. Yes, pull the sickyellow-leaved plant from the dark, your hands over the lower leaves there, take it with a gentle touch. Put it here on the sill, give it a little water. Talk to it too. It will come back if you’re careful. 

Come back, green again and reaching for the sky. (This is a story about light.)


	13. The Gospel of the Serpent

_[Prompt: Ichor]_

* * *

_London_   
_2015_

_Why is it always apples?_

We never talk about poisoned _oranges_ , it’s always the apple that gets the bad rap. What’s so terrible about knowing? About knowledge? Crowley stares at the ceiling, the slate-dark ceiling. He doesn’t need to ask how we handle those who just want to know - he was there through the heresy of the Cathars and their unapproved stories of Christ and God. He had hung around in Carcassonne, the long-haired hellspit of himself. No one needs to tell Crowley about the Crusader army of 1209, these twenty-thousand human beings murdered with a bit of steel and fire too. Their only crime was to be a Cathar, to ask for unapproved knowledge, to ache to read classified things. (The smell of blood in hay is still stuck in his nose, all this time later. He cannot wash it off.) 

What’s so bad about knowing? The Gnostics had asked too (you see how that had gone for them).

He’s not alone in bed, not with his hand there, snaking past his own waistband. A hand that he very carefully imagines is not his own, has never been his own. Wider, shorter-fingered. Square nailbeds. _Tell me about your hands, your angelic hands. These are your hands, aren’t they? Touch me, please, fuck. Anywhere you like (let me touch you)._

He needs to know. There is no shortage of fantasies. They have changed over the millennia but we have old favorites, ancient curiosities. The simplest of questions, this _tell me about your mouth. I want to taste you, the spill of you._ Get out the treasure chest, dump out the coins. These memories. Would-be lovers collect all the details, pore over every memory. The exact temperature of skin, the precise distance of me and you. (Crowley cannot hear the word _Soho_ without thinking of Aziraphale, thinking of the distance to Soho, this space between them.)

Aziraphale has a corporal form. (Crowley is well, _well_ aware.) A body with blood in its veins. But what about the ichor? That angelic ichor there, the main line of him. There in the mouth, there spent on his stomach after. Crowley thinks about cleaning him with his mouth, with his tongue. Tongue-lashed, yes. This ichor. Like pulling a nail from the vein, letting it all spill out. _God, I want you, let me please, let me get down on my hands and knees and who gives a fuck for the goddamn floor, let me get my mouth on you. Do you know how long, do you have any idea?_ His curious hand there against his hot self, pulling at himself, always slow at first, trying to draw it out. Pick a fantasy, any fantasy. A curiosity. 

He fucks his fist. Yes, furious as a piston. The pump at a well. Trouble the cistern. He pretends it’s not his hand, not his own long-fingered and maddeningly curious hand. No, he keeps his coward-yellow eyes well shut and his fingers shifting up and down again too, that gasp caught in his throat (right there, next to the chickenbone of _I love you_ that he never says, never lets out). No, pretend it’s not his hand but Aziraphale’s own and on Aziraphale’s own self. Fuck, how he wants to watch. It had been his first curiosity. His first improper thirst. _Touch yourself, please, I need to know how you do it. I need to learn you, to study you. I need to know. Pull that white something fabric back, let me see you. You’re so fucking beautiful, the softness of you. I want to bite you, fangs in your skin and the sinew of you too. Let me transform, let me be an asp again. Let me curl up around your arm like those bracelets we used to wear, all that time ago. I want to feel you while I surround you, I want to measure the speed of how you fuck yourself with my skin, my scales. I want to know by the rush of air. I won’t need to blink then, not if I’m a snake. I don’t want to miss anything._

There had been secret meetings in the past of the Gnostics. Hidden corners to tell underground Gospels. They would gather around fires or in quiet backrooms, give passwords. Secret handshakes. _We seek knowledge and many think that knowledge is dangerous. Don’t say a thing, keep it secret, keep it safe._ (Crowley has always known a little knowledge can be dangerous. It doesn’t matter. God had made him, stuffed him full of all this _need_ , all this _want,_ all this godforsaken _curiosity_ too. How could he ever be expected to keep his mouth shut, to keep his hunger hidden? To not let it fall out of his mouth? You cannot starve a man and not expect to notice.) 

_I want to hear you, I want to hear you tell me you love me, I want to hear you cry out my name. Say my real name (don’t ever say it, please, I beg you)._ His desperate, knowing fingers, having peeled too many apples, plucked too many things. Knowing nothing of Aziraphale but everything on how to push him right there, right to the razor’s edge. We all know our own downfalls. We all go swan diving at the things we shouldn’t. Does he want this? (Yes.) His hair is stuck to his sweaty face, his carcrash brows, the trainwreck of him here on this bed and these sheets like hellhands tangled around him. Seaweed and waves and drowning, yes, drowning too. What pushes him over? _You’d tell me you loved me (let’s pretend), your mouth on my neck, there at the bit between throat and shoulder, tell me to my very skin, the spaces between my cells. You’d be talking to something more than my body, to the blood inside of me, yes, and the hell-ichor of me too. That truth of me that lasts between bodies (I am talking to the truth of you). Tell me you love me, use my name, tell me I’m good enough, please. Tell me._

 _Say my name._ (He cries out, loud and absurd and fuck fuck fuck doesn’t he have any fucking dignity, any self-respect, all this fucking time? _Please, fuck, I love you. Please. Know me for what I am, the blood and the infernal ichor of me too. Let me touch the truth of you, your heavenwings and your skylight eyes. That thing that makes you something more.)_

There are things unwritten, things unsaid. He lays there, redspit against dark sheets. Gasping, collecting himself. Never satisfied, never, there is nothing of completion here. Take the edge off a little (it only makes it worse). His heartbeat slowly slows, the sweat there, cooled and damp on his skin and the weave of the fabric. What a wreck. What a ruin. _That was the last time, I fucking swear._

(It isn’t.)

Be careful, we can write stories without using a single word. Without touching a pen or paper. We can spill the milk on a bit of ourselves and it might say something we hoped it wouldn’t. Tell me of secret stories, secret knowledge. Tell me of hidden things tucked into your veins and ventricles, the aorta too. He has been writing a gospel of the hungry serpent, something to tell only to those who come quietly, who say _please let me in, I am safe, I know the secret password._

 _What is the password?_ You might say, standing there at the door, all the unpublished words still sewn up in your heart.

 _I love you,_ I might say, _please let me hear the Word._


	14. The Air That Inhabits You For A Moment

_[Prompt: Tantalus]  
The title is taken from a line in a long-favorite poem. Margaret Atwood’s 'Variation on the Word Sleep'._

* * *

_London  
2019_

It is half-past four in the morning.

 _What side do you sleep on? Do you toss and turn? Do you fade out quick? I’ve not done this much. Perhaps, perhaps I should just go on out there and ask you, you would know. (But what if you’re asleep? I don’t want to wake you. No, I’ll stay here. Give it the old college try.)_ You see, Aziraphale isn’t particularly practiced at this whole sleeping business. He’s tired, yes, so incredibly tired. It’s been a long day, you must understand. But exhaustion and sleep don’t always line up. Our bodies don’t always know what’s best for them (any insomniac knows that). 

Tell me about insomnia. About sleep, just there, past your reach. A blanket just pulled a bit too far, you can’t grab it. About water rushing in (and always moving back). Aziraphale rolls over again, settling the lump-mottled pillow _just so._ Pulling the covers _just right._ Adjusting the angle of his arm. (As if falling asleep is merely a checklist of problems to solve. As if, when you run out, you’ll shut your eyes and fade to black. The insomniac knows this is a lie, there’s no end in sight.) Aziraphale and his burnt shop, tucked here into Crowley’s own bed. Crowley’s out there, sprawled out on the sofa. _I’ll crash on the sofa, angel. Take the bed, alright? Sofa’s fine, I’m used to it._

Crowley would know how to fall asleep. He’s always got an idea. Good, bad, or otherwise. Crowley wouldn’t even be angry, would he, if Aziraphale were to press on his sleepquiet shoulder, wake him up? He’d turn from there on the sofa, red sleeplines in his face and those pleasure-yellow eyes. Blink a little, run a dangling hand through that crow’s nest of wildfire hair, say _what time is it, angel? Are you okay? What’s up, what do you need?_ Aziraphale rolls over again, this time to the left, the side with the window. That long, long window. It’s such a strangely sparse room. The whole place, really, if you look at it. But the window dominates. There’s a space between the buildings, if Aziraphale moves just right, there on the bed, there is an entire mess of night sky. Stars.

 _You told me about making the stars once. Years ago, when we were in Rome. Do you remember? (We were drunk, you probably don’t remember. I remember everything.)_ He tries to count them, those stars up there. But he was never a starmaker, not like Crowley had once been (long ago, before Eden, when he was longhaired and not-yet-Crowley), so he doesn’t know them intimately. He thinks about Rome, about that strange shift of the way Crowley had moved to the door, loose and strange, unused to his own bones. Redshift, the last color seen of a star falling into a black hole. The last wavelength to reach you.

The fire had been very red, Aziraphale knows. He doesn’t need to ask, we never ask _oh what color was the fire?_ If it’s not red, it’s a surprise. We know the red, it’s a constant. Crowley still hasn’t said anything, nothing nothing nothing at all. Just had pointed out where the wine was, stiff and whitefingered and that lift of his jaw and the too-still face. Crowley is never still. Never stagnant. Always just there, a bit of water, a bit of wine, pomegranate-haired and mouthed and anything Aziraphale needs, anything at all. 

But it’s never enough, not quite, when he does reach. 

(He had brushed a bit of ash from Crowley’s hair, had poured the wine and changed the subject.) 

Isn’t that the hell of it all? Isn’t that a hellthing? Tell me about Tantalus, standing there in a pool of water, reaching for the fruit, just there, just past his fingers. He can never reach it. Never cup it. Can never fill his hands or his mouth in the exact way that he needs to. Aziraphale knows all about Tantalus, the Greeks had been quite clear on this record. _I wonder if Crowley’s ever met him. There’s too many down there, of course, probably plenty he’s never - well, he’s been up here so long now too._ He runs his boxcar-fingered hands over the bed, over the stormgrey sheets. They remind him a little of rain, of man-drowning stormclouds and an ark somewhere, all filled up on the promise of a rainbow, on the promise of _look, I won’t drown you (well, not all of you)._ What else has this bed seen? He has tried not to think about it. But here, confronted with the very thing, Aziraphale needs to know. Look at him, lip-biting and antsy, tossing and turning and all wrapped up in smoke-ash sheets. What other arms have these sheets covered? Who has made a bed here?

(Crowley has never mentioned anyone.)

Aziraphale and his unsure-colored hair, his worry-paint eyes. This furrow of his brow and the lines on his face, yes. And the thing is, this secret I will tell you about would-be lovers, is that there is a moment when you know. There is a moment when you swallow and square your shoulders, saying _I think that, well - perhaps, my dear, I’ve seen you looking at me a little too. Would you like to give it a spin?_ Someone’s got to say it. Someone has to. We cannot stay here forever, this pool of our own making, this perfect tidal lock between waking and sleeping, this grasp at the red-bent fruit somewhere between the sky and our mouths. 

Someone’s got to say it. But not tonight. No, not tonight. Aziraphale nods, trying to listen for any movement out there, out in the hall. For any sound of Crowley’s waking. 

But there is nothing, not yet. It is four-something in the morning. He is the only creature awake in the world, having a private conversation with the bed and the night sky. But dawn comes early and always and Aziraphale is a man of light, isn’t he? Let’s look at this through a cup of tea, let’s talk it over. He is nervous. How will he say it, this _I love you, did you know that? I love you and it’s the only thing that has ever mattered. I have been such a fool but you’re so good to me, dear. I haven’t ruined it, have I? You always let me in. You always have an idea. Let me ask you this one, let me put this question to you. You and me. Do you ever think about it? It might be trouble, of course, but you like trouble. I’ve been reaching for the water for so long, so desperately thirsty._

The truth about Tantalus, you see, is this. He always reaches for the water, grasps at the too-far pomegranate. Yes, he reaches and gnashes his teeth and yells at the sky. We know that. But he never asks. Never pushes forth that obvious question, _oh, could you be a dear and bring me a glass? Could you get that down for me? Please?_

You can have it, all of it. (All you ever need to do is ask.)


	15. Roman Holiday

_[Prompt: Artichoke, lemon, sumac]_

* * *

_“I’m not afraid to tell you, what I want_  
 _I’m not afraid of anything, I want it all_  
 _Never leave me out here for too long_  
 _Put me in your movie, pin me to your wall_ ”  
The National, _Roman Holiday_

_Rome  
2020_

“Oh, which one?”

“Both look good. Whichever you want, angel." 

"I can’t decide. They both look wonderful.”

“Order one, I’ll get the other.” (Aziraphale quirks a smile. There is a slight brow raised beyond Crowley’s dark sunglasses. They both know he won’t eat it.) 

The talk in Rome is of artichokes. _Carciofi alla giudia?_ Clean the artichokes and beat to open, soak in lemon and fry in olive oil. Or would you prefer them the Roman way? Take a sharp knife and cut the outer leaves off, a bit of the stem too, drop them in lemon juice. Stuff with parsley and mentuccia, garlic and pepper. Braise in a splash of wine. Aziraphale sits across from Crowley, this usual old dance of a table and chairs, of the menus, of the lit candle and the wine bottle too. They are sitting in a sunsoaked square under an umbrella, Crowley’s long arm slung over the back of his chair and the other questing about his wineglass stem. This is a square named for martyrs. They’ve been here before, when the fires were lit. Watching heretics burn. (The hair catches first. You never forget it. You never forget Giordano Bruno tied to a scrap of wood, his face turned up to beg of that same sky. This friar had dreamt of stars, had said _you know I think this might go on forever._ We should listen to heretics. Sometimes, perhaps.) 

Now, it is a market. Now, there are restaurants. (We’ve burnt away everything else, most of the past, the weight of the church, the heretics too.) Aziraphale’s hair does this catching thing in the sun, looking like fire. There had been a time once, Crowley remembers, when humans had a habit of spraying lemon juice in hair, trying to get a look like Aziraphale’s. 

He likes to look at Aziraphale. Mostly when Aziraphale isn’t looking (or when, at least, Crowley doesn’t _think_ he is). _Don’t be so obvious, you fucking daft idiot,_ he says to himself. He’d thought this would go away, this strange want. (It doesn’t. You can’t avoid hunger just because you’ve eaten once or twice before.)

We want to hear nothing after the first kiss. It’s easy to end a poem at a kiss, to never talk about grocery lists and bickering over a wet bathroom floor. All stories must end somewhere but sometimes (for the sake of art, of course) we crop them a little too soon. We talk always about _falling in love,_ about _giving into love,_ but never explain what to do once you’re in the thick of it. Let’s look at the second verse. The next chapter. Let me write you a love poem with nothing of first kisses and nothing of last touches. Just this here, this long stretch of the center. This is what we came for. Just a day in Rome. 

Through his dark glasses, Crowley watches Aziraphale order. Watches his square hands pass the menus back and take up the wine again. That damn pinky ring. The hands fascinate him. They are not cut elegantly, not as you might even look at Crowley’s own long-stretch fingers. Aziraphale’s are shorter, squatter. But he moves like a sculptor, touches reverently. It doesn’t matter how you are shaped, what you are cut from. It’s what you do with your lump of clay. (Slither-spine Crowley has never quite figured that part out.) 

“Oh, I’ve _missed_ Rome,” Aziraphale says, soft in his face and eyes. That strange-satisfied smile. 

“You missed the food.”

“And quite reasonably so. You can’t get a good _cacio e pepe_ anywhere else, my love." 

He laughs, ”‘Course, right. Got a point there.“

"Do you remember the first time we were here? Well, dined together here?”

“Oh yeah,” Crowley squints, running a lazy hand through the hair at his temples, “Petronius. That was an… _experience._ " 

"I didn’t realize quite what was going on in the backroom there, mind.”

Crowley smirks, “Didn’t you?”

Aziraphale laughs, his cheekbones suddenly sumac-red. “Well, perhaps, a bit. But I _did_ know that the oysters had nothing to do with that.” He pauses a little, the blue eyes there like something of plainwater. Too open, as new lovers often are. “I was only hoping to cheer you, my dear. You never did tell me what was bothering you.”

Crowley might have frowned but he’s had thousands of years of knowing that a frown invites more scrutiny. Too many questions. Aziraphale knows the worst already of Caligula. Of Little Boots himself, the could-have-been-great son of Germanicus. He catches a whiff of rot, of putrescine and iron-smelling blood, all this time later. No, he keeps his face schooled, keeps it steady. 

“Was just having a day, angel. Don’t remember. Some dull temptation or something or other. Could’ve been a staff meeting even. Hell, those are the fucking worst when Beezlebub pulls out the _diagrams_. You know you’re gonna be there for _hours_." 

Aziraphale nods. (The nod of _there’s more there, I know there is, I know you don’t want to talk about it, that’s alright too._ ) He leans back slightly, brushing a hand over his clotted-cream waistcoat. Brushing the light off his shoulders too. Looks up at the bright sky. Not a speck to be seen in it but the sun. "Whenever I’m here, I think about never leaving." 

Crowley shrugs, "We could stay, if you like." 

"Oh, but the bookshop." 

"Up to you.”

“Would you prefer it - Rome? To London, I mean.” But Crowley knows, he can hear it written underneath, the _do you like what we have, what we are doing, this bit of me and you? Is it enough? Tell me._ (We are never so good at asking the real questions, getting to the heart of the matter. We are never good at exposing ourselves. Consider the artichoke, how to eat an artichoke in Rome. Cut away the fibrous outer leaves, get down to the core. We want the lemon-soaked meat of the matter. The heart of the thing. Consider the heart.) 

“I like London.” _I like what we are, this everything with you. I’ll always like it. Whatever you want, angel, wherever you want to be. That’s all that matters. I love you. (It’s okay if you need to ask, I’ll tell you every time.)_

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, smiling a little. Setting his foot there, under the table, against Crowley’s own. “That’s good then. Splendid." 

He has one hand on the stem and the other there on his thigh, then at the fork, then on the table. Indecisive. Crowley reaches out, palm up. Aziraphale catches his hand, settling there. It is warm and soft. Crowley traces small circles and angles over the hand with his thumb, catching over the skin, the feel of bone and vein. Think of later, much later. Think of a bed in a room in Rome, the windows wide open. Think of a dark sky and a travertine floor, the white sheets half spilled out there. Think of saying _you’ve braised long enough, angel,_ and pulling the cover from the pot, lifting the hearts out, soft and wet. Bring them to your mouth. It isn’t the first time you’ve eaten them, this favorite dish. Tell me how you can tire of true-loved things (you cannot). 

Crowley and the heat in his spine suddenly (maybe it’s the sun there, hot on his coppercoin-hair), hungry again. Watermouthed (with no want of artichokes). He shifts a little, stretching his long hypotenuse-legs out. Keeping one foot steady there against Aziraphale’s leather brogues. 

"Oh Crowley, you must try these, I _insist,_ ” Aziraphale holds out a forkful of the braised ones, the Roman-style. Lemon-bright. _Take me, try this, you must. Please._ “You can manage a thing or two for once." 

There is a smirk, the quirk of a city-arch brow. "What do I get out of it?”

“My undying and pledged devotion,” Aziraphale says, dry-voiced. 

“I already have that.” ( _But tell me always._ )

“Then - I promise I won’t elbow you in your sleep tonight.”

Crowley laughs. He takes it, takes the fork. Swallows the bite down without question.

"Well?“ Aziraphale asks.

"Dead on. I mean, I’ve always liked artichokes. That’s the thing. We had them with the oysters, remember?” (A very long time ago. His first time with an oyster. First time with an artichoke too. Aziraphale had taken him there, Petronius’ strange little dive. Had washed the sick right out of his mouth with lemon and brine.) 

Aziraphale smiles, Colosseum-wide. “I would never forget a meal, you know.” ( _Not one I ate with you_.) 

Let me tell you a love poem here in artichokes and lemon (a bit of sumac too). It is not about the outside leaves, the ones we pick off. It’s not about the stanzas and it’s not about where we start or even where we choose to end, to pull away, to fade to black. Let’s look at the second part. The middle. The meat of it. 

This is what we came for, the heart of the matter. (You are my favorite dish; today, yes, and every day.) 


	16. Let Us Gather Up These Lost Things

_[Prompt: Wings]_

* * *

_A Bus That Is Not Going To Oxford  
2019_

“You’re certain that you don’t mind?”  
  
“Mind what?”  
  
“Tonight. My staying over at your flat, my dear.”

“I’ve got you. Don’t worry about it.”

 _Easy enough to say,_ Aziraphale thinks. They lapse back into silence. He fiddles with his coat pocket a little. Occasionally brushes an anxious hand over the front of it, a little check-in, a little reminder. Just to make sure that it was still there, this treasure in his pocket. _Stop fussing about._

“It’s all gone then? The bookshop?”

Crowley turns in his seat, coming to face Aziraphale entirely. There is a pause. “Yeah,” he says, quiet as a blanket, “It is.”  
  
“Right.”

“We’ll rebuild it, angel.”

 _What about the books? What about everything?_ Aziraphale knows that you cannot replace a first edition, that a painting once burnt is burnt forever. Tell me, what about lost things? He touches his pocket, feeling for a secret. Let’s look in his pocket, let us climb inside, deep in there. There is a feather waiting. Aziraphale had seen it there, black against the tarmac. An ink-dark wingfeather. It had just been a moment’s pause to pick it up from the ground, this feather bleak and strange, this nothing made from earth. Just a brief moment to pull it from the ground and tuck it away into his coat pocket. 

More things have burnt today than books. Aziraphale tries not to think of the lockbox there, shoved under his bed. A strange old lockbox that had once been there, yes, hidden away (burnt now, ashes now). His little magpie collection of forgotten things. There had been that handkerchief that Crowley had lent him in 1547. There had been the program from seeing Sarah Bernhardt. (Crowley’s program, torn at the edges by nervekept fingers) When Crowley had finally tired of the bullet-hole stickers on the Bentley (finally, _finally_ sometime in 1971), he had peeled them off and tossed them on the counter. Aziraphale had kept those too. There in a box, shoved under the bed. _It’s normal to keep memories. There’s nothing odd about this._ (But he never does tell Crowley, does he, about this magpie nest? About this care and shepherding of discarded things, all Crowley-touched and an old lock of scorch-red hair too.)

Think of this (now lost) box as a museum. Aziraphale and his bonedust-hair and his curious fingers, ever the curator. Ever sifting through, holding things up to the light, saying _yes yes yes I will keep that one. I will keep that one safe. With me._ (He would give them all placards if he could, names and numbers in a collection. Put them on display. You could walk through it then. Hear your shoes echo on the hard floor of this museum, peer at the details in the soft white light. The exhibit would be endless, we could go on forever. _This is where I loved you. In Paris and London, in Kiev and Antioch too. I took this from you, this bit of hair, when you cut it in Rome. You were drunk, my dear, and ridiculous. Do you remember? It fell on the floor, I picked it up. You never noticed._ ) 

A warm hand stills his own. Aziraphale hadn’t even realized that he’d been fussing (picking at his trousers, fiddling with the edge of the seat) until Crowley’s palm comes to rest on the top of his hand. _Oh, hello._ The long fingers separate slightly, covering a little more of Aziraphale. Neither of them move. Aziraphale glances to Crowley, to that face turned to the dark window, to the passing of night-black hills and sheep too. Look at the cut of the jaw, the cliffsides of the cheekbones, the glacier-cut of his nose and mouth. That mouth, pressed here into a stiff line. Aziraphale parts his fingers slightly, letting the bone-bump fingers of Crowley’s own hand fall between them. That wire-thin expression softens slightly (Crowley does not turn from the window).

_I have not seen your wings in six-thousand years. I had not got a close look, not back then. I didn’t know that I wanted to look. They’re beautiful, you know. I do hope you know that. (Heaven doesn’t get to keep all things that are beautiful, there are more ways than just heavenly ways.) This feather is yours, here in my pocket. It’s soft. I knew it would be. Might I get a closer look sometime? Let me see your wings, this secret-kept part of you. We never get them out, do we? Do you fly much anymore? Do you keep to the ground always? (Do you miss the sky?)_

There will be a new bookshop, yes. Fires do not scorch the earth forever, everything comes back in time. There will be something new. A book nest and Aziraphale thinks that he will find a fireproof box this time, lock this feather inside. It’ll never burn, not this one. (The end of the world is over, there are millennia more to go. There are more memories to pick up in his magpie beak, to steal away like bits of red ribbon. To tie up with twigs and shiny things.) 

“We’re here,” Crowley says. _Oh, right. Quite right. We’ve stopped, I hadn’t realized._

“Oh, yes, of course. I was just - dozing off.”

Crowley quirks a brow. “You don’t sleep.”  
  
“My dear, it has been _a long day._ ”

But Crowley only laughs and pushes the door open to a dark flat. “Come on, angel, this way.”

Look here, look at this skinny hand opening a door saying c _ome in, come in, make yourself at home._ This heartthump nervousness in Aziraphale’s chest, knocking against his ribs. Look at the quiet shadows of a home before we flicker the lights on. This dark, like peeking into a breast pocket, sunless as a crowfeather nest. The color of black ink (like iron-gall, like Alizarine). 

“Do you want a drink?” Crowley asks, there as they step into the hall. “Or you can crash instead, if you want. Bedroom’s down the hall. You can take that. Whatever you like.”

Come inside, come inside. Safe here and warm, dark as crowfeathers too. Settle in here and build yourself a nest of these misplaced bits, these discarded pieces of me and you. Come inside, pick up the pieces, put them here in this pocket world. 

(Let us collect lost things.) 


	17. Away From Nineveh (Let Me Crawl Inside You)

_[Prompt: Wrap]_

* * *

_London  
2007_

“We’d be like godfathers, really,” Crowley says, listing a little to the side. His hair cabernet-stained and shoulder-long. Aziraphale watches doubtfully. “Overseeing his upbringing.” ****

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Aziraphale says, this slow-dawn smile over his face. “ _Godfathers._ ”  
  
“It’s not that bad. Once you get used to it,” Crowley smirks, casting out a bit of angelbait. _Not that bad. Once you get the taste of sulfur out of your mouth. Once you scrape it off your tongue, spit it out in the sink there._

They have been drinking heavily for six hours. Wine-drunk and talking about whales and dolphins, bananas and big bloody brains. This is Armageddon, you see. The end of the world and everything in it. The earth was built to end and now here they are, on this borrowed time of the final eleven years. Crowley’s skin still crawls with the memory of earlier in the night, being handed a basket. He’d been given a child and an hourglass. He’s done his hell-charged duty, yes, has given the child away. But he sits here now, in the back of Aziraphale’s bookdust shop, watching the sand. His stomach had dropped out there, standing in the cemetery. The lights of the Bentley behind him. Sure, he’d signed his name (his real name, ever unspoken), but fuck, isn’t this how Jonah had felt after being pushed out of the boat? Tell me, how do you stop the end of the world? _(How do you dare? Disturb the universe?)_

He’s a pathetic fucking excuse for a demon. One whiff of the Apocalypse, one glance at a ten-fingered Antichrist, and he’d run to Aziraphale, looking for placid-lake eyes and hiding his forked tongue in his mouth. ( _What a fucking wreck.)_

 _Let’s stop this. Let’s get off this hell-ride,_ he had said with his panicked tongue. Had said to Aziraphale with the same look in Jonah’s eyes as he’d had while fleeing the Lord. Jonah had been told to go to Nineveh, to prophesy against it and its wickedness too. Jonah, never a good example. What are they both but yellow-eyed with terror, with wobbly sea legs for running so far and so fast away? (Jonah had run to the docks in Jaffa, had boarded a boat. Crowley couldn’t even manage a boat. He had run straight here, to Soho, to Aziraphale and his always-even voice.) 

_Please say you’ll help. Please say we’ll figure it out. (Wrap me up in promises, please.)_

Aziraphale had broken out the wine. They’ve spent the night here, Ritz-drunk and winesloshed. He’s sobered up a bit but Crowley still scowls now, his mouth miserably tasting of tannins and dread.

“We’ll see a bit more of each other,” Aziraphale says, looking up from whatever had seemed so damn interesting about his sleeve. “Won’t we?”  
  
He shrugs. “Imagine so. I mean, can’t see how we wouldn’t.” _Please, I’d like that. (I used to go centuries without you.)_ His jealous-bellied sight drifts up Aziraphale’s too-beige slacks, the absurdly-dull coat. The question marks of his frown and worried set to his face. The mouth there, open. Ready to say more (ready to maybe be kissed). _Don’t think about it. Get your mind off it. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter._ Why would it matter? Crowley is a just a demon to Aziraphale’s angelwork, punching in and out at the same clock. A familiar drunk, a coworker from a rival team, making a fool out of Aziraphale’s wine collection and sofa too. 

“That’d be nice,” Aziraphale says, quiet. He doesn’t look up.

“Yeah, angel?”

“Well,” Aziraphale smiles, fiddling with his winestem. “I can’t allow you to _wile_ about, of course. You understand.”

“Of course,” Crowley murmurs, head dropped back and hair tangled like a nest. There is a long stretch of comfortable quiet. The bones of his hips and thighs settling into a well-remembered couch. _We’re going to do this then? Are we, angel? You know it’s not what anyone wants. Are you sure? Did you say yes to me? What does that mean? To you? Is it more than Sondheim? More than gravlax too? (Is it maybe because of me? Am I part of it? Tell me.)_

 _Don’t ask that. Don’t fuck it up._

“You’re falling asleep, my dear,” Aziraphale murmurs. It’s said softly, like there’s a smile in the words. Like there’s a pillow in the words. Crowley realizes that he cannot see Aziraphale because his eyes have been closed. He’s not sure how long. Five minutes? Ten? (The sand keeps falling, count the minutes against the rest of time. _We’re running out. I need to tell you something_.)

“No, I’m just resting my eyes. Not sleepin’.”

“Why don’t you take a nap?”

“Nah, I should get going,” he murmurs, still not opening his eyes. “You’ve got … things.”

“What things?”

“Stuff. To do.”

“My dear, I don’t have a damn thing to do but catch up on reading.”

“You’re always _catching up_ on reading. Gonna run out of books soon.”

"Nonsense and you know it. And I can do it perfectly well with you snoring on my sofa.”

“I don’t _snore_ , angel.”

Aziraphale laughs, dry and soft as a page. “This isn’t the _first_ time you’ve fallen asleep here, my dear.”

“Alright. Might just for a bit here,” he yawns. “You know, on the sofa. Kick me out when you want.”

“Let me get you a blanket.”

“Don’t need one.”

“ _Crowley,_ quit being difficult. Take the bloody blanket.”  
  
Aziraphale stands over the sofa, Crowley blinks up with one bile-yellow eye. In wide arms there is this blueknit blanket, this warm thing made by hand. (Whose hands?) Aziraphale settles it over him, over his narrow feet, over his sharp shoulders, yes. Pulls it up there at the neck. Something grazes him at the nape. _Was that you, was that your skin? Was that yarn instead? I don’t know, I couldn’t tell. You went too fast. (Slow down.)_ Caught here, wrapped up in a blanket that smells like dust. Like pages and bindings sewn up together. Aziraphale, more librarian than bookseller. _You won’t sell me, will you? You won’t give me away. Keep me here, please. Just for awhile. The Antichrist is out there, somewhere in America. Come with me. Let us make a mess of things, let us spoil the fun. Smash the hourglass, spill out the sand. (I need more time.)_

The end of the world is coming. He is falling falling falling. Look at this wine-dark blanket like a net, knit here in navy and sargasso sea blue. Held out and covered over him _. Don’t let me hit the ground, don’t let me sink. Don’t let me be found at the bottom of the ocean, long after the end. Fodder for archaeologists. Catch me in your open mouth. Keep me here, safe in your krill-hungry stomach._ The whale had swallowed Jonah once, kept him there between ribs and sinew, undigested and wrapped gently in his body. 

_Was that your hand?_

Wrap me up. Keep me safe. (Catch me if you can. Keep me in your blanket-body, warm in this deep blue sea.) 


	18. The Unicorn in Captivity

_[Prompt: Crowley's reaction to the escaped unicorn.]  
Note: The referenced tapestry is very real and can be [seen here.](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/467642)_

* * *

_London  
2019_

There are many bookshops in London, all with a different something or other to say. We’re passing by this one, let’s take a glance in. Peer in the windows, see what we see. It’s late. It’s dark. It’s nothing, of course, this bookshop in Soho. Don’t look too closely. There’s an odd smell about it, it’s a bit damp. Take a gander at the owner’s labyrinthine opening hours and decide to head somewhere easier instead. Don’t bother with this one. Too much work. The lights are off and door is locked-fast. This _do not, do not, do not come in._

But this is about the other side of the door. There are only two sides to a door, inside and out. We constantly are opening them, closing them, hovering there in the in-between, thinking _I need to get on with it, make up my damn mind. In or out? Coming or going? (Tell me which to choose?)_

This door to a shop. It is closed now and the shop is dark and quiet, empty but for the linen-haired man leaning against it, his head tilted back into the woodgrain, his breath desperate and heavy too. His fingers still grip the doorknob, tight and entirely forgotten. And this smell of something, even his angel-sharp nose can’t quite pick out the nuances of it. The threads of the tapestry-weave here. The hint of very human sweat and salt, of skindust too. The smell of ash and honeycrisp apples, of seared meat and of scorching metal. (The way stars smell, he’s been told. He knows; he’s been told all the stories about the sky.) 

Aziraphale is still wearing Crowley’s jacket. It smells like him. _Oh dear, I’m really in it, aren’t I?_ He runs one hand over his face, moving from the door to collapse in a wingback chair in the center of the unlit room, sparing a miracle for a tumbler of peat-dark scotch, the kind heavy with the taste of bog-druid bones. _It’s nothing. It’s not a thing, it’s not a problem. Don’t worry yourself sick about it. There’s nothing to worry about, after all. Nothing there. He’s just a friend. You’re just making this all up in your mind anyway. Look at you, you’re just a rumpled old angel with a boring bookshop. Not his type (if he was looking). He’s not yours either (I’m not looking). Just focus on the shop. Nothing to see, nothing there._

We never stop thinking about it, we only ever learn to stop talking about it. So Aziraphale sips at the scotch and flexes his fingers, looking at his black-clad and Crowley-jacketed arms. _Is this what it would smell like if you were around me? Your arms there? Why is it always fabric? It’s not the same, just this fabric._ He looks up, glancing toward the end of the hall leading to the spine-shatter narrow steps to the flat. He stands, gathers his glass. Heads up into his own private space, the book-crammed shelves and the Baroque desk. To the rows of quills and fountain pens lined up, to the wine collection and well-washed glasses and then he stops here, here at the rarely touched bedroom. 

There is a tapestry hung over the bed, woven by carnivorous hands. It is vertical and simple, a white unicorn fenced in, tethered to a fruit tree. These bright colors, yes, of yellow weld and navy woad, done in wool and silk and silver itself. Past the captive unicorn, past the fruit tree, these needy hands and clever fingers had placed all the plants of Eden. These fruits of a garden, this freely-given tree. This fence here and tether too, wrapped around the unicorn’s neck. _Please stay, please stay. Right here, in this circle. This is where I need you._

You see, everyone has the story of the one who’d got away. Look at Noah, building his Ark and taking in the animals two-by-two (while everyone else nervously watched the sky). For Noah, it had been the unicorn. Spooked and wild, taking off west. 

“Oi Shem! That one’s making a run for it!” Crowley had called (though he had still been called _Crawly_ then), pointing one hiss-sharp finger off to the distance, following the escape. “It’s too late. It’s too late. Well, you’ve still got one of them.” Crawly had looked to Aziraphale then, quirking that odd half-smile and shrugging. Burning-bush hair caught in the wind. Then the clouds had started to spit. 

“Oh,” Aziraphale had said. “I suppose it’s starting.”

“I hate rain,” Crawly had muttered. “How long’s this storm supposed to be?”

“Erm, forty days.”

“Forty _days_?”

“Well - and nights.”

Crawly had frowned then, the dark of the sky against him, his skin indistinguishable from sand. “Then what the _blasted devil_ does anyone need _me_ around for? Seems like your lot’s got the worst bits covered.”

“It’s God’s plan.”

“Right,” Crawly had said more to the cloudsky than to anything, looking up and scowling. “Sure." 

"Crawly,” Aziraphale had started.

“Look, angel,” he said, glancing back. Crawly had swallowed then. Aziraphale had watched, suddenly dry-throated. Watched the Adam’s apple. The bounce of it here, a seagull on the waves. A buoy there in the water, demarcating safe water from the deep and the dark. _Don’t come, no, not over here. It’s not safe (not for you)._ "Look, angel,“ he had said again, "I’ll catch you around.”

He had gone west. (Aziraphale had watched. Had coughed a bit after, shaken his hands, his head. Shake it out, shake it off.) Thousands of years later, seated at a loom in Brussels, he had thought again, this hundred-thousandth time, about reaching out and casting a rope over the runaway, about building a fence around. _I love you like a fence. I want to keep you here, keep you safe with me. There will always be a door (you can leave if you wish.). Let me build myself around you, let me shelter you from rain. Let me plant you a garden. I am not supposed to love you, not like this. Angelic love is empty and cloudwide and there’s room enough for everyone. Not like this, I love you with just enough in there for you and me, this fence and the door (you can open it if you like, I hope you don’t)._

Hundreds of years later here, standing in the doorway to his bedroom and staring at a white-woven unicorn on his own damn confession-tapestry, Aziraphale drinks a bit of scotch. _I shouldn’t. (I should take your jacket off. Not yet. Not yet. How do you get it to smell like this?)_ He leans his nose to his shoulder, breathing it in. Bringing in deep into his lungs. It’s so far inside him. It always has been. Yes, that’s the problem. Take a shower, take a bath. Wash your skin, your hair, drag the soap over the muck of you from topsoil down to toe. But you can’t get the insides, no. You can’t get at your ribs, your heart, can’t wash that spot behind your liver, you know the one. Where the love has fallen out, overflowed, spilled down the cracks of you. You can’t reach. 

_“Do you want a nightcap?”_ Aziraphale had asked and Crowley’s eyes had widened, yes, and his throat had swallowed there, just the same as it had once in Mesopotamia. As it had then once in God-punishing rain. He had turned so quickly from the shop, muttering something about getting the jacket tomorrow. 

Aziraphale takes another sip, slower now. It is apple-season, you see. Janus-season. Autumn, the time for change. _There’s no one watching us. Not now. Not this time. You went west down that street. Perhaps, oh, I don’t know - how do you go about this? Should I try? Will I regret it? (Will I regret it if I do nothing?) How do you say ‘I love you’ to someone you’ve known forever? Six-thousand years. Can I really just, oh lord, invite you back to mine, ask you up to see my etchings? (Please don’t laugh, please don’t run.)_

Here, this garden and the fencepost. This lush grass, this woven frog and silk-dragonfly too. Aziraphale bites at his lip. They have dinner reservations tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow. Yes, perhaps tomorrow he can think of open doors.

You see, the greatest love stories are the ones we’ve never told. (Let us fix that, let me write you a love poem in silver thread and blue-wode dye. Let me tell you of woven things.) 


	19. Flour Water Salt Yeast

_[Prompt: Hand kisses]_

* * *

_The Cottage in the South Downs_

_2029_

It is a Sunday afternoon. Warm and bright, the windows open. Fresh cut grass coming in, the sound of the sea. Crowley and his _creative_ use of language, inventing obscenities no one’s ever dreamt of in six-thousand years.

He’s kneading dough. How does it go? It’s been the same all this time. Since we cut down the first wheat, since we dug up the first stones and ground out the flour. Flour, salt, water, yeast. This bread to bake and break, to place between us on a table. Yes, bread was the first thing we learned to make and offer. You don’t invite someone in without saying _are you hungry? Have you eaten? Let me get you something._

Crowley’s hands are cramping, kneading his sore fingers into this smooth dough. He could use a mixer but it’s never quite the same as working it out on the counter, as pulling the dough apart himself, getting his hands into the meat of it, the fear of himself into it. He pauses, leaning against the counter, holding the dough up and stretching it out as thin as he can. If you can see the light come through, it’s ready. The gluten will hold, the structure is sound. Baking bread is building a home. 

“Crowley, that’s bread, you’re baking bread! Oh, it smells wonderful. What sort?” Aziraphale says, walking into the kitchen. 

He doesn’t look up, just dumps the bread in a basket, covers it with a dishtowel. (Some sort of _gingham_ pattern that Aziraphale had insisted on. They’d split the difference. Half the towels are slate grey, half in this objectionable gingham.) “Just a basic loaf. Nothin’ special, angel.“ 

"It’s all special, my dear,” Aziraphale says in that quiet voice. That voice that Crowley has come to think of as the cottage voice, banked and quiet, full of something else too. Look over there, at the ember-smile, look at the light in the eyes, the flecks of dust catching in the sunshine through the kitchen window. There is bread flour too. _Fuck, I’ve made a disaster mess of it._ On the counter, on his blackdenim jeans, in his wildfire hair. 

“I know why you keep me around,” Crowley smirks, “You just want fresh bread.”

“Well,” Aziraphale laughs, “Yes, that too.”

Aziraphale lays his hand across the counter, takes Crowley’s flour-covered fingers. Lifts them up, flour and salt and water and yeast (this old recipe of him, nothing new under the sun). Kisses the knuckles. Kisses the sides, the edges of the fingers. Up and down the index finger, lip to hand. 

(Is he breathing? Crowley checks on his lungs. He is not. _Breathe_.) 

_God, fuck, will you ever bank? Will I ever feel less like this? Will you? How does it still feel like this, like this rapid expansion of light, each time you touch me? Are you sure that this can go on forever? Will you still love me in thousands of years the way we love the nothing-new of bread?_ Aziraphale there, the both of them in this sunbright kitchen on this unnamed Sunday. Maybe there is flour in Aziraphale’s hair (you cannot see it, not with all this white). It’s certainly on his mouth now, where he’s kissed it off from Crowley’s bread-bake hands. 

“You taste like salt,” Aziraphale murmurs. 

“Consider me shocked, angel.” _I love you, fuck, I love you and it just keeps going. We shouldn’t have come here, to this cottage, you shouldn’t have put me in this basket. I’ll over-proof, spillover. You’ll have to clean up the mess of me (I hope you’re alright with that)._

“Did you set a timer?” Aziraphale asks, looking up. A tug of a grin. “For the bread?”

“Yes,” Crowley arches a dark brow, his blackjacket arm still held out, his fingers still wrapped up in Aziraphale’s hands. He can feel the drag of the mouth against the back of his hand as Aziraphale speaks. The fold of the words said directly to skin and tendon, to bone and vein. 

“How long?”

“‘Bout an hour, give or take,” Crowley says, leaning hard into the counter, his hip sharp into the stone edge. _God, how I love you. The way you touch me. The way you kiss me_. Aziraphale turns Crowley’s skinny hand over, moving to press his kiss into the veinnest there of the underside, Into the green and the blue of him too. A kiss to the vein is on an expressway of blood, delivered here directly to the heart. He shudders a little, shoulders loose and jangling in black cotton. 

“ _Angel,_ ” he whispers. _Don’t tease me. Please._

“Get over here and kiss me properly,” Aziraphale says, between the space of Crowley’s own fingers, pulling at his arm. Crowley keens into the air, rounds the counter. This isn’t the first time so there is no need for hesitation, just this same bit of taking himself, his mouth, his lips and tongue and offering to Aziraphale. This bit of _here, try this, taste me, I am an ancient recipe. A classic. Nothing exciting. But you like the classics, don’t you?_

Aziraphale tastes like the flour he kissed from Crowley’s own hands, like the salt of his own too-human skin. This press of a familiar mouth, this opening under Crowley’s doorknock tongue, this moan into him. Some kisses are the beginning and end, some lead on. This one is a first chapter. The first proof. Into the oven with you. 

We don’t have to open the oven door and look inside. See here, the bread in the basket, this rise. This is it, this kitchen space with copper pots and gingham towels. There is a row of herbs growing on the windowsill. Basil and rosemary, marjoram and thyme. There is olive oil set out and a salt cellar too. The cupboards packed with biscuits and jam (Aziraphale’s favorites). The wine-rack heavy with full-bodied reds (Crowley’s preferred). This kitchen-soft love, this bread-bake love. Standing here on a white-tile floor, this tangle of arms between them. Crowley’s oven-red hair sharp against the flour-white of Aziraphale. These mouths here, saying _I love you I love you I love you._

We can be well-practiced lovers together, our mouths like a baker’s hands there on the dough. Give me your strong hands, take mine. Let us knead each other here into beautiful shapes.


	20. A Beginner’s Guide To Waltzing

_[Prompt: Dancing]_

* * *

_London  
1912_

He hasn’t read a word on the page. Not a damn one. 

Not that he _cares,_ mind. Not that he even knows what book it is here, held in his spindlethin fingers, close to his nose. It’s really about the concealment. The low slung hat, black and stiff-wooled, doing a little something to hide Scarlet Fever-hair, to hide his bile-yellow eyes. 

Crowley is not supposed to be here. He knows that. They haven’t spoken in exactly fifty years, since tossing bread to miserable ducks at St. James’ Park, since asking just for a little favor, a little something, a little insurance. _Give me water, please, I’ve been in the desert all this time. Don’t you see the clouds there, dark as stones? Dark as a grave, a cairn. God-angry clouds and you know there’s nothing of pity (there never has been). Remember Noah, why the fuck haven’t you been looking at the sky?_

Think of rain. (Give me water.) 

Fifty years. They haven’t spoken, the two of them. A better man would have stayed away. If Crowley had any decency at all, even just the smallest cell of it buried somewhere in his spine or maybe in his cornea or fingernail or _anything_ , he might have stayed away. He doesn’t, no Instead, all he has is this rotten habit, slinking in with his hat pulled low and with a newspaper in front of his face, opening the door to the bookshop, this wretched door with a godforsaken bell. It’s a public spot, an open shop. It’s perfectly reasonable to come here, of course. 

(Aziraphale never says hello to him; Crowley never offers.) 

He is not the only customer today. A man leans against the counter, asking Aziraphale his opinion on Oscar Wilde and mentioning that bit that makes Crowley stop breathing. ( _Breathe, breathe. Let the air in. It’s not important_.)

“There’s a dance this Saturday,” the man says, his hair offensively slick. “At the club. I was thinking - you might join me?”

A dance. Of course, always a dance. _You and that bloody gavotte, what a crock. Fuck me, I’ll never do anything like that._ (He will, the advent of disco will prove him wrong. That comes later.) But there is a dance at Aziraphale’s “discreet gentlemen’s club”. There’s always a dance, though the fashions of it come and go. Right now, the hesitation waltz has become all the rage. Crowley’s gathered the nuts and bolts of it from slinking into parties, dropping temptations in their ears and in their laps and nicking the champagne on the way out. Performed by two partners, these slow-step movements. Waltz together and then hesitate. 

Aziraphale slows his hands over his pile of books, over the leather binding and their tooled covers. His fountain pen there in the well, the brightness of him there against the dark wood of the shelves and the desk too. He looks up at the man, still leaning indecently against the desk (in Crowley’s very _expert_ opinion), keeping skypale eyes focused on this interruption and never glancing over at the black-suited tear in the corner. Never looking over at this casual visitor (several times a week), this one that Aziraphale, of all the customers, has never hastened out of his shop. Has never bothered. If Aziraphale seems to find reasons to work in the general vicinity of Crowley’s particular haunts, it’s only coincidence of course. 

Someone needs to say something. Go first. Take the lead. The music is starting again. _Will you go first? (Should I? I’m still so bloody mad at you. Fucking say something, please. Why does it have to be me? I will if I have to. It’s been so goddamn long.)_

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, “I’m afraid I’m not much for dancing. Bit too much of a trouble, really. Trip over my own two feet, I daresay. Why don’t you take John? He’s been talking about the dance all week.”

The man doesn’t take long to leave after that. (You always know when there’s no port in a storm.) Crowley doesn’t move. Stays in this corner, staring at this book. How long has it been since he’s turned a page? What is this book about anyway? Something about evolution? Change? Something about throwing birds on an island and leaving them well-alone, something about not finding the same thing later. This march of change, of moving to become what we need to be. Dig down into the earth, into the dirt, tell me if the fossils of yourself bear any resemblance at all to the topsoil.

Crowley swallows, the bump of his throat. Don’t look at Aziraphale, there just across the room. Don’t listen to the even count of their breathing, this music of one, two, three, four. Holding the breath, hesitating on the five and six. He shifts his serpentboned body in the inkblack suit, running an anxious hand across his stomach briefly, the buttons of his waistcoat. Don’t look. (He looks, he’s a miserable thing.) 

Aziraphale gets out his pen, a sheet of paper. See there, the cassock-pale hair of the bent head, the pausing hand. He scratches out a few words. Crowley moves forward slightly, not thinking. Still not reading, still not turning the page. Still just watching, yes, watching with tornado-warning eyes. The pen pauses on the paper, the ink spreads out like a dark sea. _Breathe_ , Crowley reminds himself. 

They both breathe at the same time. This is how a fire starts, this hypoxic moment, the sudden disappearance of oxygen, the screaming of all the cells of the tissues of the body. Your lungs know the danger first and the blood next. Fire comes quickly. 

“I have been curious about the waltzing they’re doing lately,” Aziraphale says, mild. Soft. “I hear it’s quite the _in_ thing.”

“Since when have you ever been _in_?”

“How’s the Darwin?” Aziraphale asks, looking up finally, a quiet smile playing on the edges of his mouth.

“ _Obviously,_ it’s fascinating, angel." 

"Obviously, my dear." 

"You wanna get some lunch or something?” _Do you want to dance?_

“I’d be delighted.” _Yes, I would love to._

Take my hand, watch your step. We don’t have to be good at this, we don’t have to know all the movements. It’s just us, you and me. This waltz. This dance with just enough room for the two of us together. Listen, the music is starting. Let’s dance.


	21. I Am Easy To Find

_[Prompt: The National -[You Had Your Soul With You.](https://genius.com/The-national-you-had-your-soul-with-you-lyrics)]_

_Some song lyrics are worked into the text._

* * *

_Rome  
41 AD_

How do you eat an oyster? You must find one first. Get your fingers out, pull it from the seasalt suck of the ocean, of the rockpool. Don’t trouble yourself with the shell, if it’s nice or not. The good part’s the meat of it, the inside. Get a knife. Crack it open.

Crowley’s had enough of knives. He’s in a foul mood, slinking about on the shore, troubling over bridges. We don’t need to get into Caligula. This flayed feeling, this wirestrip misery, this ancient ache. It’s a wound without a bandage and a little lemon juice here, squeezed. Shell-less and exposed to the sharp air. If he struck out his wings, how many feathers would you find left? So what to do but walk the miserable length of the Tiber, kicking at grass and throwing stones into the river, hoping the water feels it. _Yeah, I hope that one hurt._

He had paused, reached up to brush the hair from his face. There’s nothing now though, nothing grab at, to fiddle with, to touch. (He had forgotten again that he had cut it a few days ago. Just here, just now, upon porting into Rome. He’s never had it this short before, never felt the air on his neck like this. There had once been comfort in the tilt of his head, a rush of red-tide riverbloom hair. Something to hide behind. Gone now, left on some barber’s cutting floor.)

Black-caped shoulders had rolled a little, trying to find a way to squeeze the uneasy muck out of him. This unpleasant feeling. Yes, try to stretch the legs, shake it out, like pushing all the drink from a wineskin. He tries to pick it out from between his teeth. Stuck there in his throat like a chickenbone. _Fuck it, I’ll just drink it off. Might as well. What else is there to do? They’ve already done everything I could ever dream of. Say what you will about Tiberius, fucking hell._ (Crowley had at least caught Claudius’ sympathetic eye, something quick over a banquet. This trade of _yeah, I know, I saw that too._ Crowley had rather liked Claudius. _I hope he does alright for himself. Keeps his head down. Stay the hell outta trouble there._ )

There’s a tavern not too far-flung from the river. It is human habit to crowd around water, to refuse to travel very far. Sixty-percent of the human body is water, so we rarely wander off. Not when thirst comes too quickly, not when the sun is too steady. We dry up in hours, days. No, don’t let the river out of your sight. The Tiber River, the neckvein of Rome, flowing out to the sea at Ostia. That port over there, not too too far, Ostia, known for the old castrum, those half-wrecked military buildings. Ostia, known for oysters too.

(He had felt dry, itchy. Maybe it’s time to soak. He’d thought about jumping in, seeing where he winds up. But that might be a bit overdramatic, so he’d decided to soak himself in drink instead.)

Crowley hadn’t _expected_ to find Aziraphale here. To somehow wind up tucked in a corner of Petronius’ place, here and now with that absurd brightsmile sitting across from him and that _irritatingly_ infectious warmth. 

“Wait, they’re _still technically alive_ ,” Crowley says, arching a brow and poking at the oysters with a long finger. 

"Well, yes,” Aziraphale says.

“People _eat these_?”

Aziraphale waves his hand over the scattered feast, the small table. (Big enough for just the two of them; small enough for knees to knock.) “ They enjoy them, Crowley. Humans do a lot of interesting things, _you know that_. And these are delicious, you must understand. Try them, please do. Besides, you’re a demon. Whyever would you get _squeamish_ over this?" He quirks a look over at Crowley. It’s a considering look. He is taking in the hair like house-red wine, taking in the sharp edges. These chisel-carved edges, this pile of dead men’s gladiuses left abandoned to rust. Crowley, this brittle snap of him like drydead grass.

He grumbles a little. (Not missing the indulgent look on Aziraphale’s face.) 

Consider the oyster. Consider this sea-salt treasure plucked from ocean rocks by quick hands. Divers with good eyes, open underwater. Pearl divers with their nets. We looked for pearls first. Who was the first person to pick up an oyster, see there’s no pearl, and figure _hmm, I’ll see how it tastes instead_? (Be careful what you swallow. Be careful what you put in your mouth.) Crowley watches as Aziraphale’s fingers pick up one, raw on the half-shell. A little lemon squeezed in. Crowley mirrors him, choosing his own. He raises it to his skeptical mouth. 

"Cheers,” Aziraphale says, raising the oyster higher and then knocking it back all in a single go.

Crowley pauses, _first time for everything, I guess._ Lift it up, swallow it down. 

It’s soft. And delicious. Saltgentle. He makes a face ( _you should always keep up appearances_ ).

“How was it?” 

“Passable, I guess.” 

“Of course. Another?”

“Your funeral, angel.”

Aziraphale laughs. He has a patch of sun on him, it’s egregious on the marblewhite fabric and the sandwhite hair. Too much white, this heavenfaced grin. Crowley scowls a little, resentful at the way Aziraphale is lightening his mood. Why does he want to cling to the misery? Wrap it around him, this saltmuck seaweed? He should let it go. (He is in no mood.) 

The oyster is shell-bearing. Protected. There’s a crack in the middle, this is how sand gets in. This is where you put your knife. Once the oyster is opened, it should be swallowed as soon as possible. Put it on your tongue, taste the sea and the softness too (hidden always, wrap your own bone-mouth around it, protect it in your throat, your stomach, the meat of you). Do not crack open an oyster unless you’re hungry, don’t be wasteful. _You and your oysterswallow mouth; you and your shellshucking hands. Don’t touch me, don’t. Don’t pull my top off, don’t show me to the sun. (Not unless you can take me in, gather me up, show me the way within you.)_

Aziraphale leans in a little, a touch conspiratorially. “I cannot believe you haven’t tried one yet. You know, they say these are _aphrodisiacs_. I figured you would have had to have been around them with all your tempting and wiling.”

He blinks. “ _Around_ them, sure. Haven’t eaten them though, angel." 

Aziraphale pauses, the wine cup halfway raised. "Why not?”

Crowley shrugs. “Never really saw the appeal. Bit slimy.”

“My dear, you _liked_ it,” Aziraphale smiles a little, that quiet sort of thing. It looks like Heaven in him, whatever Crowley remembers of the godrotten place. (The feeling of light, the feeling of fullness.) 

“Did not.”

“You did! You made the noise!”

“And just _what_ blasted noise are you on about?”

“The _mmm_ noise, Crowley. I know that noise.” _‘Course you do, angel, I’ve never met a bigger hedonist._

Crowley takes a drink, half-covering his face, hiding an unadmitted smile. “Can’t prove it,” he mutters. Their knees knock again. Crowley pulls his away in an instant. 

“No,” Aziraphale laughs, “I think that would take a _miracle_." 

Aziraphale pauses a little, fingers dancing over the oyster selection, tips of them still wet from the last one. It glistens. It would taste like salt. And the ocean. _Right now, you would taste like an oyster._ Crowley lets himself sit back a little, drop a little of the day from his shoulders. Shake off Caligula and the smell of knifesteel too. Shake it off, pour it out. Relax, cupped in careful hands. 

He reaches for another. ( _Maybe I liked it. So shoot me. I’m never going to admit it though_.)

Crowley’s hand touches Aziraphale’s own briefly, grazing as they each go for the same half-shell. A warmth covers his blush-mottled chest, the tips of his ears. _I hope you can’t see that._ Aziraphale coughs a little, looking away quickly. Crowley’s fingers are wet with the caviarliquid from Aziraphale’s hands. He wants to lick it off. He doesn’t lick it off. _Is that weird, thinking that? Am I overthinking it? Overdoing it? You have no idea how much I wanted to see you and I didn’t know either until you just showed up out of bloody nowhere with your ridiculous grin and offering to tempt me. To tempt me, angel. Do you even - Should I say something? Is it time? No, don’t open me. Not yet. (I have only one thing to do and I can’t do it yet.)_

Keep your oyster knife there, close at your side. Let me know when you’re hungry, let me know when you’re ready. (I am easy to find.)


	22. Doubt Thou The Stars Are Fire (Doubt That The Sun Doth Move)

_[Prompt: Bloodmoon]_

_Note: The title is a quote from Hamlet. (Act 2, Scene 2)_

* * *

_London  
1601_

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says. He pours a little more wine into both of their glasses. Pauses, studying the balance. Adds a little more to top them up. It is the end of June and humidthick. The hotlick of summer has begun crawling up around London and it sticks on the back of the air. Tonight is a lunar eclipse. A bloodmoon. 

“For what?”

“You _know_ what. The play.”

Crowley squirms a little in his seat and wraps his fingers around his glass. He hunches a bit over the table, dropping his chin into one hand. He looks like a snake when he does this, cobra-shouldered. _Well, you were a snake. That fits._ Aziraphale watches him quirk a sly look over. “Nothin’ to it, angel. Said I’d do that one. Always good for it. No big deal.”

“My dear, you made it the biggest hit of the century. It’s not even a comedy!”

“You’re lucky I was feeling indulgent. It’s a _drag_.” He shrugs. “Besides, _you_ had the rotten luck of going to Edinburgh to ride a blasted horse. Really need an alternative to horses, you know. They’re inventive sorts, humans. Figured out guns and fireworks all on their own. Gotta be something there.”

“There’s _nuance_.”

“In what? Fireworks?”

“In _Hamlet_ ,” Aziraphale says, lifting his chin a bit primly.

“What bloody nuance? It’s a load of dreck, if you ask me. Hamlet’s just walking around _moping_ for half the goddamn play. He might as well get on with it. Do or do not, that’s what I always say. Don’t just _waffle_ about for eternity.”

“Thank you anyway. It meant a lot to me,” Aziraphale says again. Crowley shrugs, his hair falling across his face a little with the duck of the chin.

Aziraphale smiles a little, amused by Crowley’s inability to take a bit of gratitude. They had found each other for tonight’s performance of Hamlet. The first one since Crowley’s miraclework, leaving the Globe packed, the ground covered. They had picked their way through, blackbooted feet crunching on dropped hazelnuts.

"Are you watching the eclipse tonight?“ Aziraphale had asked, looking up at the clear sky. ( _Don’t you dare think about storming,_ he warns the air. Keeps a spare miracle in his pocket for a rainy day.) 

"Dunno. Maybe,” Crowley had said, circling him, this strange habit they’ve picked up. Aziraphale has grown used to it, this idea of revolutions and rotations. Tell me about being a fixed point, tell me about light and the sun at the center. Tell me how the moon feels about the earth. Tell me about this circling of him, about being Aziraphale-centric. _Hold steady,_ Aziraphale had thought, unsure what he meant. What is more constant? A steady center or the reliable revolving of the moon? We can count on the tides, we can count on the days. The moon always rises.

Mankind has started to cotton on to this idea. Tell me about heliocentricity. The story of revolutions. At first, we assume we are the center. We are only thinking of ourselves, our own soil. Then, we look up, over a book perhaps, across a library. A garden wall. Then it hits us like a shock, a surprise. A dart of the sun or the moon over the black. A lantern suddenly lit, a fire started. Light is always a surprise. 

Aziraphale had stood firm, wondering who is circling whom. Crowley and his shovel-jaw, the black-lensed glasses hiding the sunlit eyes. _Take them off. Please, it’s unfair. You see me, let me see you_. He had felt babblegunk rising in his throat, the way it always does when he’s nervous. What comes to the surface? Nonsense, really. _What do you think about Ophelia and her rosemary? What do you think about remembrance? Have you read Copernicus’ thoughts on heliocentricity? They’ve thought this up before, of course. You know Philolaus had rather put the sun at the center, Aryabhata and Martianus Capella too. But it’s getting a little popular these days._

 _Don’t say it_ , Aziraphale had thought, _don’t make a fool of yourself in front of him._ _Why do you circle me like the earth and the moon?_ The moon and the earth make no light of their own. They never have. But we catch the light, shine it into ourselves, bathe in it, show it to the ones we love best. An observer on the moon would see the cast of earthlight if they chose to look up at the bright blue dot planet there, hanging in a blackvelvet sky. We have always known moonlight. A night without moonlight leaves us adrift, at ends, edgy. The quiet light is a constant, we have always been loved by the moon. 

Aziraphale’s eyes had followed Crowley. Studied the dark angles of him, the sharp and shadowed corner of him. There had been a twitch at the jaw, just a little something, like a soft smile suppressed. (Aziraphale had memorized it, filed it away, missed nothing.) 

“I’ll buy you a drink,” Aziraphale had said. Yes, because tonight is a lunar eclipse. _Please stay. We can get a jug of that wine you like. Oh, perhaps a bit of mutton. That sounds splendid. (I don’t know why I want you to stay. It’s been a long time. Maybe you can let me just - not think about it, not explain it? Tonight?) Say you will._

“Nah, angel. You don’t need to get me anything. ‘Course I’ll stay.” Crowley had properly smiled then, tilting his head again, unclasping the hands that had hid behind his back. He paused in his circling, near to Aziraphale’s side. Aziraphale had looked at his arms, at the nightblack fabric, the skinny hands. He could see the dust of the theatre’s dirt floor where it has kicked up from their groundling feet.

There’s still dust on his arms, hours later. The two of them together and winedrunk. Waiting for the show to start. Aziraphale watches. He’s watched Crowley all night. Really, he’s studying the way Crowley watches things. His yellowrapture eyes (when you can get a peek at them). He has a way of getting very focused when he’s considering, when he’s absorbed. (Remember Golgotha, remember how Crowley had swallowed up the execution, every drop of it. Bearing witness with his sight, saying _I will not spill this, I will forget nothing_.)

Aziraphale shifts uneasily. _You’re always so certain. You always know what questions to ask. I don’t even know where to start. How are you always so certain? Steady on._ Yes, Crowley had watched Hamlet intensely, his mouth twitching at _words words words,_ his brow deeply furrowed by the end. 

“You did like it a _little_ then? The play?" 

"S'alright, angel,” Crowley shrugs, loose-limbed. “Really prefer the funny ones. You hang out enough downstairs and the tragedies just _really_ stop doing it for you, you know?” (Not Hamlet with his inky cloak. Not some blasted ghost muttering about revenge by moonlight.)

“Oh yes, of course, that makes sense, my dear. I didn’t think -“

“Shhh, come on, angel. It’s starting,“ Crowley says, his hand reaching out to brush Aziraphale’s shoulder, get his attention. It blooms warm there. “I like it when it turns red. The moon.”

_Yes, you told me about that once, a long time ago. In another tavern not very different from this one. You told me about lightwaves and their bend, about how the longest ones are red. The moon is blocked from sunlight now but if you were to stand there on it, on the red moon, you would see the earthlight bright as a star in the sky. (They call it a blood moon. Red is so much more than blood.)_

Look up at the moon. Red as this spill across blackjacketed shoulders, hanging on a rawboned face. It’s dark in the tavern, this window here and the lantern the only little light for this corner. Crowley takes off his glasses, peering up through the window. Aziraphale has seen a lunar eclipse before. This is how light goes, refracted onto the moon by the earth’s atmosphere. The moon, cut off from sunlight yet finding a little light still from earth. 

” _Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt thou the sun doth move._ “ It comes as a whisper. Aziraphale wonders if he heard it out loud or in his own mind. _Did you say that? Did I? (Should we sober up?)_

"Did you say something?” Aziraphale asks. _You did, I think. I heard you, didn’t I?_

“No,” Crowley says, rough. “Pay attention.”

Aziraphale nods. His hand twitches, wanting to reach out and brush the hairfall, trace along the long line of the throat and the artery there too. This carotid cord. He doesn’t. Instead, he swallows. Lifts his glass for a drink of wine. Don’t think about it. _Don’t make trouble. Just watch the eclipse._

Look there, up at the sky, the red bloodmoon. It’s okay if you can’t see the sun, if you don’t have light of your own. (I have earthlight enough to share). 


	23. I Held Him And Would Not Let Him Go

_[Prompt: Song of Songs]_ _  
A note: I have made liberal use of[Song of Songs 3 ](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song+of+Songs+3&version=NIV)here, sprinkled throughout. I have also made use of Percy Bysshe Shelley's [Ozymandias](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias)._

* * *

_The Cottage in the South Downs  
2033_

Crowley is watching Aziraphale. Watching the hair catch the light, the hands drift gently across Crowley’s own stomach, his lean-long lines.

_I’ve looked for you for so long. You were there the whole time, weren’t you? In the corners of rooms, down alleyways, in kitchens and graveyards. The streets and squares. I couldn’t find you (that’s my fault, I didn’t know how to look.) I was afraid then. (I pretended not to be.)_

“Do you remember the first time?” Aziraphale asks. They are laid out on the bed, a banquet of skin. It is warm today. This September day. Apples are growing in their tree out back, heavy and red. Ready to be picked. 

“Yes, always,” _I remember every time._ Crowley leans up, running a wide hand over Aziraphale’s bare chest. Up the shoulders to cup the neck, pulling Aziraphale down to kiss him. “But the details are getting a bit fuzzy, you know. Maybe,” he says with a quicksmirk eye, “Maybe you should _remind_ me. You know, if you’re up for it." 

"You old serpent, you’re incorrigible,” Aziraphale laughs. “I shouldn’t encourage you.” _You will though, won’t you?_

Crowley grins, devildark. “You love me.”

“Always.”

The first time. We haven’t told that story. Listen now (it’s time).

* * *

_London_ _  
2019_

“Come back to the shop with me, my dear,” Aziraphale says. His goddamn leather-brogue foot pressed there next to Crowley’s own. Crowley takes a long drink from his wine, nearly choking on it. He’s shaking a bit, there in denim and a black shirt. Another jacket. Sunglasses. He’s held together by a bit of stitching. _Don’t look for loose threads, don’t pull me apart._

“Anything you like, angel.” _Anything. Sure, angel, whatever you like._ He tightens his fingers, releases. Shifts in his chair. Leans forward, leans back again. Searching for any way to get this anxiousness out of him. This terror. His shoulders roll. Tilts his neck side-to-side, glances around the restaurant. (Don’t look out the window. Don’t look for rain.)

The ride back is quiet. Aziraphale folds his hands in his lap, Crowley drops his leadheavy foot on the gas pedal. They don’t speak on getting out of the car. They don’t speak while Aziraphale unlocks the shop. Nothing until Crowley mutters _let me get the bottles, stay here_ and stumbles toward the kitchen.

“I have your jacket,” Aziraphale says. “It’s in the closet. I’ll - get it then.”

“Sure. Whenever.”

“It still smells like you.”

_‘Course it does, I made sure of it. I want you to wear it. I want the smell of me to come through your nose and your mouth. I want you to taste me on your tongue. How else can I get to you? Just this wretched smell of me trying to board you, a stowaway on a rainsplatter coat._

“Does it?” Crowley asks, “Where’s your wine opener? Can’t find it in the drawer. You know they’re making cider the big thing these days? Know you never really took to beer over wine - which you should try, by the way, nothin’ like a bloody good lager when you fucking need one.”

“Apples and smoke. Hot metal.”

“Huh, yeah. Fancy that.”

“I wore it to bed.”

Crowley stills. Then starts digging through the drawers again. He passes the wine opener three times, grazing it through long and distracted fingers. He’s not paying any attention to kitchenware. _Don’t look up. You’ll fuck this up. (You couldn’t even manage to stay put on a cloud and you had some goddamn fucking directions then.)_ His head is bent, the hair falling in his face. He’s due for a trim (maybe he won’t go, maybe he’ll let it grow). Redshift-haired, the longest waves of light. 

“Are you listening?”

He puts two hands on the counter, leaning his weight against it. Not looking up, this head bent to the countertop. “Yeah, angel, I’m listening.”

“Are you okay?”

 _Pull yourself together._ He straightens up. “Yeah, absolutely. Never better. What’s that thing you say, tickety-boo? Yeah, that. I’ll put it in angel terms. You want red or white?“

"Red, please.”

“Chianti? Or you’ve got this cabernet that looks damn interesting. Hell of a label. Bit flash.”

Aziraphale hasn’t said anything. Crowley looks up and realizes that he’s instead spent that time drawing closer, having the _audacity_ to just walk into the kitchen and stand there in the doorway. Having the sheer utter _gall_ to have hair bright as starlight under the kitchenlights. Aziraphale’s pale brow is a bit furrowed, his mouth as twisted as what his hands are doing in front of him. _You’re terrified. We don’t have to, angel. We don’t need to talk about this. It can just keep being what it is, whatever we like, right? It’s good now, isn’t it? God, don’t say anything. (I’m drowning, please.)_

“I slept in it.”

Crowley stares at him. At the tenseness in Aziraphale’s worrylines, at the determined set in the jaw. _You’re an unstoppable force when you want to be. You are the most stubborn creature in existence, aren’t you? (Fuck, I love you.)_ Crowley turns from the counter, facing him. Still half-leaning, still slick-spined and useless. What use is his body? What use is this rotten flush up his sternum, hot under the black shirt? What use for the blush on his ears and the way he swallows repeatedly, this scattershot slamfuck of his heart? 

(What use are hearts if all they ever do is just give themselves away?)

“Why?” He asks, rotten and ruined. _Don’t ask, why the fuck am I asking? Pour the wine, go to the couch. Go to the door. Miracle away. Get out, get out, get out before you spill yourself all over the floor, stain his fucking shoes. Kalamazoo is nice, isn’t it? (No one will find me there.)_

“Because it was yours,” Aziraphale says quietly. He’s not looking away. Bluerain eyes.

“Because it was mine,” Crowley repeats.

“You have to - ”

Crowley’s fingers hurt. Why? He glances, realizing they are whiteknuckled around the wine opener. He tries to loosen them. 

“Look, angel, can we not - words, I’ve never been, look, we don’t have to, can we just not? Look, I’ll pour the wine, it’s good wine, right? We can forget about this. You wanna go for a picnic tomorrow? We can do that. Aziraphale -”

Aziraphale shakes his head a little, eyes wide and soft and a bit of wonder. _What are you doing? Why are you coming closer?_ “You’re worse than I am, my dear, you really are -” And then he’s not talking because he’s come forward, because there is a long line of chest to chest, of black cotton against cream linen. 

He’s kissing Crowley. Crowley has never never never thought about not kissing back. There is no pause, there is only this collapse, this give, this wave of ache in the back of his mouth. There is the taste of salt, the taste of dusty skin. This bit of angelwork flesh and bone under his half-starved talonfingers. _I need you, I need you, I need you. Tell me it’s the same, tell me I’m not too much. Tell me I won’t drown you, pull you down. Tell me I’m not the rocks in your pocket, that I won’t weigh you down. Tell me. (Aziraphale tastes like ancient things. Like oysters, yes, and artichokes too.)_

Whose hands are these? There are hands everywhere. On his chest and in Aziraphale’s hair. Up and cupping Aziraphale’s neck, tracing down to the curve of his collarbone. There are hands brushing wondrously over Crowley’s closed eyelids, tracing the sharpdark brows, followed by dry kisses on each lid. It feels like anointment. It feels like light, like being left rockwarm in the sun. 

“Why?” Crowley asks, not sure why. (He knows exactly why. I’ve been trying for millennia. _I need to know. I need to hear it_.) “Why’d you wear it?”

“Because I love you,” Aziraphale says, watching him, one hand laid on the side of Crowley’s face. “I love you, my dear, and I have for so long and I wanted to know what it was like -”

Crowley drops his forehead against Aziraphale’s, his arms tangled up around him. His arms wrapped like roots, dry so long, desperate for water. This is water. Drink.

“What do I do now, what - how am I - You need to tell me -" 

Aziraphale kisses him again, brushing the worry from where it’s spilling from his mouth. _Let us wash the worry away_ he seems to say with his comfort-touch. His warm skin and his warmer hands. His milklight hair (Crowley cannot keep from touching it, from running his long fingers through it. Soft and coarse.) 

"Don’t worry, don’t, don’t. My love, oh. We’ll figure it out together. That’s how everyone does it. We’re not the first. We won’t be the last.” Aziraphale takes him by the hand. The bedroom is not far beyond. They don’t bother with the light. It’s a quiet night in Soho. There is nothing here of fire. Just this, these specks of dust.

* * *

_Back to the cottage (let us look forward, always always)  
2033_

Aziraphale traces the muscles of Crowley’s arms, his skinnyrib back. He is flung out here, this pile of angles and edges, softly caught by the mattress (held by loving arms). 

“ _All night long on my bed, I looked for the one my heart loves_ ,” Aziraphale murmurs. 

Crowley quirks a brow. “Are you reading _poetry_ to me? Come on.”

“It’s Song of Songs, my dear. Hush. Besides, _you’ve_ quoted poetry to me before.”

“Making you listen to Lou Reed is not quoting bloody poetry." 

"That’s not what I was talking about. Anyway, hush up. I’ll make it worth your while." 

"Well, in that case. Quote on, angel." 

So Aziraphale tells a love poem. Let us follow him. It starts with a kiss to the mouth. Nudging in and parting the red-sea lips, dipping into plainwater tongues. This knock of them together, knowing where to move, which way to go, where to put your nose and your teeth. Familiar lovers playing on well-held heartstrings. (” _All night long on my bed, I looked for the one my heart loves_.”) Aziraphale moves further, further. To the neck now, to the long road of the sandy throat, kissing the carotid, this quicktravel road to the heart. _Let my kiss travel in your blood_. A tongue under the jaw, the soft parts there too. A lick there, just under the ear, the iron-gall dark snake tattoo. Crowley shivers, clutching at Aziraphale’s shoulders. ( _"I looked for him but did not find him_.”)

“Oh, god, angel - ”

“Shh, listen. You’re so beautiful, darling, I could tell you every day." 

Crowley whines. He pushes up against Aziraphale’s chest, gripping at him, shifting his hips and rolling them over. Biting at an offered shoulder, an earlobe, pressing his hips into Aziraphale’s. (” _I will get up now and go about the city, through its streets and squares_.“)

"Can I?” He whispers, moving hands down Aziraphale’s solar plexus and stomach too. The flour-soft skin, here just at the waistband. _Can I dip in, can I run you through my fingers like grain and wine and water? Can I touch you?_

“Yes, yes, yes, oh yes,” Aziraphale whispers right into Crowley’s ear, the words safe into him. Breath hot on red-coil curls. (It is long now, long and grown. A blanket to cover them.) Crowley dives, yes, his hungry-fingered reach opening. Yes, his hands and then the core of him. His snapshot hips and the way Aziraphale meets him. _I love you, I love you, I love you. I would ruin myself for you (thank you for never letting me, thank you for catching me. Thank you for covering me in the rain.)_ Yes, a hungry mouth at the throat, this kiss here. 

(“ _I will search for the one my heart loves; so I looked for him and did not find him._ ”) Aziraphale is whispering, words falling like rain, like a rosary. His eyes clenched shut and fingergrip tight on Crowley’s sweatsoaked shoulders. Snap, snap again. Forward and back _. I found you, you found me. I won’t go anywhere (don’t you dare leave me here)._

“Oh hell, angel, yeah, keep doing - " 

"You’re so good, you’re so perfect. You are, you know that, don’t you?” Aziraphale gasps, his fingers brushing the long hair from the soaked forehead, resting on Crowley’s mouth. He swallows them, down. Another connection. Another point of touch. (“ _The watchmen found me as they made their rounds in the city. ‘Have you seen the one my heart loves?_ ’")

"You’re killing me, Aziraphale, what - fuck, shit, you’re good at that, fuck - " 

” _Scarcely had I passed them when I found the one my heart loves._ “ Yes, found. Found finally, left to wander in a desert. These forty long years and forty long nights, parched and thirsty. Glaring at a nervousblack sky. We have written histories here in the margins, telling our own story over and over and over again. Tell me again how you fell in love with me. Tell me how I loved you. We write in milk first, quiet and hidden. Then a pencil (keeping erasers near). Now there is ink, when you touch like this, it is always with a pen nib and with permanent ink. _Mark me, make me yours. I love you._

"I love you, fuck, I love you, I love you, I love you,” Crowley says, burying his face in Aziraphale’s shoulder. The sheets falling in ruins. Round the decay, this colossal wreck of the bed and the duvet cover too. The pillows knocked to the floor. 

Aziraphale kisses him. Again and always, it is never enough. It will never be enough. “I love you,” Aziraphale says.   
  
The world is white. He is flung out to the sky, his arms collapse. He falls. (It is different now. The sheets are soft. There is soft skin below him and a ratatat-beat heart, sweat-soaked fingers in his hair.) There is Aziraphale and his voice, this quiet hum of his chest. 

“ _I held him_ ,” Aziraphale whispers (Crowley mouths the words with him, they know this one by heart). “ _I held him and would not let him go_.”

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted with permission.


End file.
